The Wall - extended version
by pinkolifant
Summary: An extended version of my one shot where Michael survive and Sara and Michael meet in a Pyramus and Thisbe situation through a wall of a psychiatric hospital. There will be two OCs important for the story and I intend to include several more characters from the show: Kellerman, Lincoln, T-Bag, Sucre and Mahone.
1. Chapter 1

**The Wall - Extended version**

I don't own Prison Break and I don't make any profit out of this.

All events and anything or anyone mentioned in this story are purely a product of fantasy and imagination. Any similarity to real events or persons is purely coincidental.

I also finally corrected the typos in my short story with the same name. The events similar to that one shot are going to figure somewhere in the middle of this longer story but they may unfold in a slightly different way or with different consequences.

**1. The Job**

**11 April 2010**

**A conversation over the cell phone, routine recording by an automated system of an unnamed intelligence service in charge of national security, never used in practice because it doesn't contain any key words triggering further analysis or response.**

_"Kelly," (a raspy male voice with a slightest hint of trepidation in it) "he's awake. I'm so excited about it. We can finally get a go at it."_

_"Are you sure?"(a lazy female voice, very much unconcerned) "Isn't it just another false alarm of yours? Some wishful thinking to help you in your situation?"_

_"No. Come and see for yourself." (unmistakable excitement, elation, joy in the male voice)_

_"I've got all the intention to."_

_"What do I do in the meantime?"_

_"You'll just publish the add, I guess." (female voice, commanding) "The sooner, the better."_

_xxxxx_

**A job add published in several newspapers with national and regional coverage**

_"Doctor, general practitioner, with at least five years of clinical experience. Several positions available. Expertise with patients suffering from psychic or psychiatric conditions is desirable but not an absolute precondition to be invited for an interview. One year contract with possibility of extension in a new psychological ward of Saint Agatha Hospital, a recently founded medical facility for women and men seeking to restore the equilibrium in their lives. Situated at the driving distance from Helena, Montana, in a picturesque forest surroundings. Good working conditions, an interesting remuneration subject to agreement. Starting date, as soon as possible. Send your application to our management team led by the Chief Executive Officer, Ms Kelly Davis…"_

xxxxxxx

It's been five years since his death and it should come to her easier with time.

It should.

Nonetheless, Sara is still pretty much unable to visit his grave this year, like every year, or to face other members of her extended family for that peculiar yearly reunion with a peaceful smile they are used to seeing on her face. The weather is lovely this April and little Mikey is already standing at the door, happy, beckoning her to come.

Yellow calla lilies are ready at hand.

She finds a face she needs on that day, deep in a place where she cultivates the necessary indifference in her soul.

The postman delivered the newspapers earlier that day. She never reads them. But on that day she always looks for the way out, for the impossible escape, and several odd job offers in distant places of the country are circled in red, like fresh blood stains on the spilled black ink. She doesn't know why she takes those too and dumps them on the back seat of the car when they go.

It is worse this year than it was before. Maybe because the day is entirely too beautiful or because she feels particularly alone. She is embarrassed when she kisses Mikey and lets him carry the yellow flowers to his father's grave. She is ashamed because as much as she adores her son, being a mother isn't enough on some days, on the anniversary of Michael's death most of all.

All it takes is one minute to make a difference between life and death.

A brief moment when she runs through the prison door because he tells her to do so, that second in which her hopes explode: she is free but her life is never quite the same.

She is a doctor but the more she thinks about it, the less she can accept on face value the diagnosis of an incurable brain tumor, recurring, to make it worse, as a valid reason why he did what he did. There are many doctors in the country, there are specialists in the world, to start with. And when they fail there are those weird people who eat the inside of the peach and apricot pits, jog endlessly every day, overdose on vitamin C and claim to get healthy from all that. She still doesn't believe in miracles, or in any of those supposedly natural ways of treatment, but if they could have helped him, she thinks that she could have started.

The decision comes easy to her when they are left alone in the car and she notices that she packed their most basic belongings and put them in the trunk. She doesn't even remember when she did that, or why. She fastens Mikey in the seat and tells him, trying to sound cheerful.

"We're going for a long ride."

"Where are we going, mom?" he asks her in his intelligent voice which only makes her want to cry, and her decision falter.

She always imagines Michael must have had that kind of voice when he was just a too smart kid, unaware of the future that expected him, before he was left alone with Lincoln. God knows what kind of cruel future expects her son. It's for the best not to think about it.

"To Montana," she says and starts the car, ignoring all the calls on her cell phone as the miles between her and the rest of the people who loved Michael slowly increase in number. They will all be returning shortly to other cities and countries where they live so why should Sara not be allowed to leave?

Only when they are half way across the country and she is looking for a motel to spend the night, she answers a single call from Lincoln.

"Yeah, I'm doing fine," she states. "It's just that I decided to accept this job."

She is lying. She hasn't yet applied for it. They may want someone else, with a better, cleaner CV, a physician with no history of substance abuse or falling in love with an inmate. On a positive side, she does have the experience of working in prison and that should count for something. Half of the convicts there suffered from some psychic trouble even if no one bothered to check them for it.

"Well," Lincoln tries to be positive, "that sounds great." And he fails miserably, in her opinion.

"Mikey is almost old enough to go to school, in some places," she says, failing even more miserably to justify her reasons, the ones that she is unable to outline rationally even to herself. _A gut feeling._ _What good are those? A wish to make a break._ Except that she should never use that word, or remember that it exists. Not even in her mind. Because if she does, she will turn into a nervous wreck, and both Mikey and her will get hurt when she crashes the car against some tree in a too high speed.

"He'll be five, I know," Lincoln keeps on trying. "Call me when you settle down. What is it, your job?"

"Guess what, I'll be a doctor. In some calm green looking hospital in a forest surroundings. Maybe there are also mountains nearby."

"Sounds like a nice place to visit. Where is it?"

She presses a few buttons on her cell phone, randomly, faking the loss of connection. She's unable to tell Lincoln at that moment that the clinic she may work in is in Montana. She'll have to think about how to tell them that later. Good people have died in Montana for no good reason at all.

She never knows why she kept one of the yellow flowers they were taking to Michael's grave. She has heard of traditions in some far away countries across the ocean, places she wanted to visit as a student in medical school and never did. She may still do it, one day, when Mikey grow up. There they say that the uneven number of flowers is for the living, and the even number for the dead. Now the number is uneven both with Michael, on his lonely grave, and on the dusty road with the two of them. She tells herself she kept it for the scent. The day is too warm. The aircon blowing dries up the air in the car too much, and occasionally she has to sneeze. Her vision gets blurred. The white line in the middle of the road unfolds steadily in the distance.

But the calla lilies are free of smell so she couldn't have kept it for that reason at all.

_xxxxx_

_**Another recorded conversation over the cell phone, later on the same day.**_

_"Kelly," (not so deep male voice, arrogant, somewhat altered by an undefined emotion) "what do you think you're doing?"_

_"What does it look like?" (female voice, purposefully slow, mocking)_

_"She's been through enough!" (male voice, in righteous unstoppable anger, rising)_

_"Yeah," (female voice, cynical) "I heard part of it. I'll keep her alive, and with most of her body intact, I can promise you that. Unlike what you tried to do to her in that washroom. Was it in New Mexico? I always forget."_

_"Kelly, stop it, please!"_

_"Let me pull aside," (female voice, practical)._

_"Christ, are you driving?"_

_"I wouldn't mention the Lord if I were in your shoes. He may hear you and deal out his punishment…"_

_"You're on your way to Montana, aren't you?"_

_"Listen to me, Paul," (female voice, threatening) "you're out of my line of business now. Stick to the politics and trust the others to do the dirty work."_

_"Kelly! You can do so much better than that!"_

_"It's a bit too late to say that now, don't you think so, Paul?"_

_(beep of a phone conversation being cut off)_

xxxxx

The phone rings again and the name written on it is so shocking that she switches the device off entirely. She never thought to hear from the congressman Paul Kellerman again, not after his rise in politics. She makes a mental note to change her number if by some miracle she does get that job and stays in Montana. She never did it before for sentimental reasons. As if Michael could ever call her again.

A stay in nature will do her good, she tries to believe in that. She never receives Paul's text message saying: _"Don't even think of taking that job, Sara. You've got no idea what you're getting yourself into." _The text returns to the sender, undelivered, lost in the virtual unreality of the electronic communications.

"Mom, I'm hungry," Mikey says, and Sara smiles for real.

And just like that the world is a bit better, a place where kids and their moms have to eat and maybe have a glass of milk to sleep better.

Sara, the mother, puts the yellow flower in her hair, amazed that it has not withered after a long drive. Well-armed with a gale of indestructible motherly love, she finally dares to dig out a pic of Michael Scofield from her wallet and stuck it in the flap of the sun visor on the inner side. That way she can see his face when she wishes, but not so directly. The visor is down because the evening is crawling closer, and the sun is getting lower, making driving more difficult and more pleasant at the same time. The car trots forward, and soon they will need gasoline, too. The blue-green eyes stare at her from the photo, immobile above a grey sweatshirt, almost of a Fox River edition. There would be only one thing possibly worse than losing Michael.

And that is if she had never met him at all.

xxxxxx

"How long has he been like this?" a slow female voice asks above his head, and a hollow male one hurries to provide a sensible answer. "Since this morning. Since last night, maybe. We didn't watch him permanently after five years of unchanged condition."

The confidence is missing, the man is scorned by a woman, clearly in charge of the matters as they stand: "Nor will you do it now. Not directly at least. Only from a distance. He should not know."

"If he can hear you now, than he already knows."

"He can't hear me yet."

"If you say so, Kelly," the male voice is suspicious. "You are the surgeon."

But he does hear them just like under one of his eyelids he sees the long surface of a clear blue sheet and a blanket that used to be white, but now it contains imperceptible alterations in color and texture, probably from repetitive washing. The smell of the washing detergent is pungent, and it's most likely not the one commonly used in households. _An institution then_, he knows. _But what kind? _He doesn't open his eyes pretending to be asleep, until they leave. Pretending, something he discovers he is good at. Then he only opens one eye half way. The effort is tremendous, and moving his limbs impossible. It is like he has never had any muscles in his body. He focuses on a part of the blanket that he does see, and after a few minutes he is sure he would recognize it in the pile of blankets of the same brand and model anywhere in the world.

A machine beeps close to him with regularity. Monitoring, supervision. Why observe a person who can't go anywhere? Still, he doesn't like the idea at all. He isn't sure he's a person but he thinks that he should be. The next center of his focus is the floor. Clean. Clinically clean, smelling on disinfectants. An institution. A prison. A hospital. A medical ward of a prison. He never knows why prison is the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe because he knows he is being watched from a distance, and he doesn't see why the patients in any decent hospital should be watched without their knowledge and consent. _Why would following what I do be important to anyone? _The beeping, on the other hand, it's some instrument more complex than a simple one measuring the heartbeat they would have in any better prison. It's something elaborate, the numbers and the other data on a small screen he cannot see very well probably register and evaluate more vital functions that he is aware are existing in a human body.

He wishes he could move at least a bit to extend his area of study. He can't. His focus goes up for the first time. The ceiling is oppressive. High, and by the looks of it, of a very solid construction. Secured. State of the art. He loses hope watching it. There is no easy way through it he can think of. So he looks down.

The leg of the bed he's lying on is made of metal and is ending on a wheel. A hospital bed. He doesn't feel ill, only unable to move. What is he doing in the hospital, then? He believes he could speak if he opened her mouth. Maybe he should have said something to those people above him. Something in the back of his mind tells him it's much safer he did not. _Why should I worry about my safety?_ he doesn't know either.

Another smell comes from the outside, and he realizes a window must be open in the room he is in. It has to be the warm time of the year for the surroundings to exhale that perfume. Late spring, maybe the beginning of summer. The idea of the month of April fills him with the sudden dread of dying. He doesn't want to die. So he chooses to believes it is summer reigning on the outside and that his life has just started. The distance to the window must not be too great. If he could walk, he could reach it and use it to get out. Out. That thought soon gains huge proportions in his head.

But what would he do then? Where would he go? The realization strikes him as he thinks of that. It's not only that he has no idea where he is. He has no idea who he is nor how he came to be there. A brief look at the visible parts of his body tells him that he's not old yet. He may yet be all right. He doesn't feel old in his head. And he knows, he knows, if only he keeps looking he will find the answers he needs. Then, he will have a plan. Planning is important. Details are important. And he is good in grasping the details. That much he knows.

First, he needs to move. Willing to move a finger gives no results. Only the opening of the eyes is possible. He tries to wiggle a toe on one of the feet, only to realizes he is missing that toe. He attempts with the other foot, and that works better, or at least all the toes are there. The quick mental tour of all the other parts of his body leaves him partially sure that he still has all the rest of the body parts except for the two toes. He would breathe out as a sign of a relief but no voice comes from his mouth, lips unmovable as the rest of him. Petrified. Stoned. _Maybe they gave me something? _he thinks. _But why would they? _He is sure of one thing, those two people wanted him awake. _How long have I… slept? _He has no idea whatsoever.

So he opens and closes one of his eyelids at the time, and occasionally believes that he managed to wiggle a big toe. But the sensation of the movement could very well be only in his head.

xxxxxx

**The house of congressman Kellerman, presidential candidate for the second time, late that night.**

A well placed call to Lincoln, trustful as ever, reveals what Paul already knows. Sara is gone for a job offer somewhere in the countryside. _Helena, Montana. _Paul says how happy he is about it, to Lincoln, and how thrilled he is for Sara, to finally be able move on. When Lincoln hangs up, Paul has no other choice but to place another phone call that same day to a person he never expected to speak to again.

"Kelly," he hisses at her over the phone, and he doesn't even know why she is answering him again. That's nothing like Kelly he remembers from before he started to work for Caroline Reynolds. His former business associate has always been trickier than the weather. Kelly can change her number faster than most people can change their pants. Then again he never bothered to check on her after their fallout. Until his papers were delivered that day and he saw a new game being played out. He nevertheless tells her what he called her for, and that means being much more honest that he usually is. Almost as honest as Lincoln by his standards. "This time I'm coming after you, and I'm getting _her_ the hell out of there. Whatever it is that you're doing, just find someone else."

"_I wouldn't do that, Paul, really," _he hears her casual reply over the phone, and there is that sound of a tea spoon stirring the excessive sugar in a hollow-sounding mug_. So she still has her tea very sweet, _he remembers with certain melancholy.

"Why not?" he inquires, knowing or expecting the answer he gets.

"_Oh, Paul, darling,"_ she says the way she knows it irks him to no end, "_you know that I'm more than able to take you out by myself if I have to. You wouldn't want to ruin your rampant progress on a society ladder, would you? Imagine your brains spilled all over one of your latest expensive suits. Wouldn't that be a peculiar sight?"_

"I'd be so happy to meet again too," he tells her and he means it. Even if he knows that she is right. If he wants to help Sara, he'd have to use exactly that part of his living brains which he purposefully put to partial hibernation since his new career started progressing so well. The times of cowboys are over, even if there are still native Americans living close to the place where Kelly has set her bloody clinic, and God knows what other lucrative criminal activity on the side.

Paul truly wants to help Sara because she's still alive, unlike his former partner and many other people he had put in the ground for the good of the country. So he needs to think of something with better chance to work out, something other than storming to Sara's rescue and getting killed in the process. Kelly Davis would enjoy that, he has no doubt. She might organize him a luxurious funeral afterwards, bring him flowers, and cry on his grave, but that's another matter. He throws the newspaper to the basket, rolled in a ball, and makes himself a cup of tea, a habit he lost for late at night, since... It's best not to dwell on it. For a second he remembers Kelly the way she was before she became a well paid assassin. Bright. Quick. Way too fast for her own good. He doesn't want to imagine the rest of her CV after she became a murderer, but he has no doubt that it's equally impressive.

In all the wrong ways.


	2. Gathering

**Chapter 2. Gathering**

**Fox River Pentientiary, May 2010**

Theodore Bagwell nervously turned the leaflet upside down before the interview. _Maybe this was not a such a good idea, _he was suddenly obsessed by some second thoughts. Then again, anything was better than food in new improved Fox River Penitentiary under new incorrupt management from which you could not buy a single favour or blackmail them into making your time more pleasant. Not even fresh _fish _tasted as juicy as before.

The woman who would interview him was _black, _and stunningly ugly, in her late forties, with a butt of an ox. _A creep, _he thought, _they want a creep. They collect maniacs because they believe they can help them out. A prisoner with serious psychological, preferably even psychiatric problems and diagnosis, _the glossy paper demanded.

_I will give them one, _he decided. _Dad would be proud. _Before the woman could ask her first question, good old Bagwell was all over her, half biting her neck, half choking her with her own bra he managed to pluck out. It felt _invigorating. _She didn't taste that bad, he had to admit. He only regretted he didn't have time to have his way with her and kill her before the guards subdued him violently as was their job. And the new ones were rather good at doing precisely that. _This would have confirmed the diagnosis, _T-Bag thought with satisfaction. He wondered what the new prison would be like and concluded once again that it couldn't be worse than the one he'd been already rotting in for the rest of his life. _Thanks to Michael. Cute, cruel Michael._

_Dead Michael, _T-Bag thought with even bigger satisfaction. He may have been a creep and all that, but he was still alive and kicking. When it concerned him, he intended to keep things exactly that way.

_Montana, _he thought with sheer enthusiasm, _here I come._

The happiness over leaving Fox River and going somewhere else made him as excited as when he drove all over the country with a bag of stolen dollars in the back seat of an equally stolen car. He wondered if anyone had ever found the bag with money in South America again. Or if it became food for fish, the real ones, cold and more creepy than good old T-Bag could ever aspire to be.

The leaflet T-Bag found in the garbage can where the warden's cleaning lady must have dropped it, lay abandoned on the floor of the interview room, reading for no one in particular:

"_The ward for incurable patients in the clinic of St Agatha, Montana. Prisoners from state penitentiaries convicted to a life in prison are allowed to transfer in case of serious psychological and/or preferably psychiatric troubles. You are a director of a state prison and a prisoner is causing you trouble? Let us help you. Our team of experts directs problematic individuals to community work in comfortable natural surroundings, providing maximum security at the same time. A human approach to the unhappy bottom of our society..."_

The bottom of the society that went by the name of Theodore Bagwell too to whistling cheerfully almost all the way to Montana. He would have tossed his hat in the air if the guards had allowed him to wear one.

xxxxx

**St Agatha clinic, Montana**

"Ms Davis," Sara nods politely, taking an offered seat in a white square office in the heart of the newly built clinic, situated deep in one of the largest, most virgin looking dark forest of pine and fir she had ever seen. The facilities are built on a large clearing, probably deforested for that purpose, but the trees are everywhere around them, standing straight next to the road winding up Sara had to drive on to reach her new working place. She has to look at the glass door of the Chief Executive office with the particular painful longing no one else could understand. It appears to be exactly the same, same built, same model, as the door of her own office in Fox River that she had left open for Michael, years ago, just before going to kill herself over it. _It may have been better if I succeeded, _she thinks and hates herself for thinking it because she know it's a lie and she's only being a coward unable to continue as Michael would have wanted.

"Mrs Scofield," the short black haired woman interrupts her line of depressive thinking matter of factly, her cold blue eyes studying Sara's references and motivation letter with precision. "I am glad that you could make it here so soon. I have to admit to you, it hasn't been easy to find competent staff motivated to move out of the civilisation if only for a year to start with."

"Civilisation has not been one of my top priorities in the last five years," Sara says sincerely and smiles at her new boss.

"If you need help to settle..."

"No, thank you" Sara refuses smoothly, "you will find that I am not very demanding. I will find something soon."

"Great," the short haired woman who could be seven or eight years her senior approves and offers Sara a hand.

Sara shakes it and as she does so she notices the unnatural coldness of the other woman's skin, in sharp contrast with her welcoming posture. Almost as if she had artificial skin or gloves, something totally science fiction like.

It's impossible, but Sara still has second thoughts: "Maybe we could do a probation of half a year."

"I'm so sorry," Ms Davis declines, "it's a year to start with or I will have to look for someone else."

The sun is shining, and Sara thinks she should not fear this woman. The clinic is brand new and clean from what she can see, the patients rich and harmless. Mikey liked the city where they will live and she really, really doesn't want to go back. There is nothing for her where she came from.

"All right," she says, "I guess... I guess I haven't been working for a while so it's hard to assume a new obligation just like this, out of the blue."

"I know the feeling," Ms Davis says. "Welcome to St. Agatha, Sara. I am sure that we will be good friends."

"Kelly," she crosses the treatment barrier carefully, treading on uneasy ground. Her boss' smile widens and when they shake hands again Kelly's skin seems more normal.

Sara is not sure about anything at all but she still agrees to it, or doesn't object to it, and then she hurries to the outside to find Mikey. She finds her sun playing with a worm on a green meadow next to the wall of the precinct under the watchful eye of a friendly looking sturdy guard.

"He's a good boy, Madam," the man tells her, "wouldn't hurt a worm, just studies it for what it does."

"He is," Sara has to agree. _He's the best boy. _"What's behind this wall?" she asks.

"Oh, nothing much," the guard says scratching his head. "They are building a new ward for incurable psychiatric patients with sufficient funds, but it's not in use yet."

"I see," Sara says and wonders if she would work with those people as well. Somehow it's not what she wanted. And soon she drives away with Mikey, down the road she came form, carrying the picture of the wall in her mind, an archaic structure of stone masonry, built to resemble a castle rather than a medical installation. She assumes the rich can and will pay for the state of the art care which looks antique to the uncultivated eye. It is the last night she spends in the motel and she dreams about the wall, thinking that somehow it is important. Next morning she rents a house, and Mikey is all thrilled about it. It has a garden, and it rained at night, and there are not only worms, but also snails, large and friendly. If you put them on your hand, they crawl out of their houses, antennae and soft body moving forward, unafraid.

It's a good place and Sara is glad when Mikey smiles.

She buys a new phone, it's a smart one, a recent product on the market, and calls Lincoln. It has been three days since she got in touch with anyone, and three days since she ditched her old phone.

"Hi, Linc," she says, "Mikey dropped my phone in water," she invents the first thing that comes into mind. "I just bought a new one. I was busy with the moving and all to do it sooner"

"Yes, I found a house," she confirms.

"Yes, I start in a week," she laughs a tiny bit to reassure him that everything is fine. Even if it will never be.

"Sure, you will visit. When we settle a bit, OK?"

In the end she asks him not to give her number to _anyone, anyone at all. _And she believes him that he'll not do it.

Because Michael is dead but they are still family.

Xxxxxx

The doctor who comes to see him has short black hair. _Wiry. _Her nails are artificial, he notices immediately, her look too scientific for his liking. There is a pair of glasses in her white coat which she chooses not to wear. _She doesn't need them, _he understands, _but she lets others believe she does._

"Hello, Michael," she says. "My name is Kelly."

"Hello, Kelly," he replies and wonders if Michael is his name. It doesn't sound too bad so he accepts it for the time being. He doesn't like the name Kelly. He thinks it could belong to something called the Company but part of his mind tells him that the Company is dead, and the more conscious part of his awareness, more rational and less intuitive, informs him that he has no idea what the Company is or if such entity exists at all.

"Do you remember anything?" Kelly asks him.

"About what?" he asks back. He doesn't remember a single thing before waking up in a hospital bed and seeing this woman and a fussy grey haired man above him, but he would rather not admit that. It's somehow embarrassing to say the least. He is not a newborn baby, he isn't. Yet he knows there is so much escaping him that he could almost be an infant. If only he would stop noticing things, the slightly torn border on the white coats' right pocket. The tiny stain of ink somewhere on the floor. It's tiresome and serves no obvious purpose.

"About anything," she insists and her smile is triumphant.

_She knows, _he understands, so there is no point in hiding.

"Why do I feel that you will tell me about things that I do not remember?" he asks again.

"You have been very ill," she informs him, with only the little bits and pieces she deems he should know. "You've done some pretty terrible things before you were confined to our care. And than you had a terrible accident in which you nearly died. I operated you from a head injury after the explosion which very nearly killed you. You lived hooked on life support machines for five years."

"Was there a tumor in my head when you cut it open?" he asks, not knowing why, not even knowing that the operation she _says_ she had done involved the cranial area. _It must have, _he believes, against his better judgement.

"No, Michael," she says, "there wasn't. You were lucky that your brain remained more or less intact. But we cannot say the same about your memories, can we?"

"The terrible things I have done before," he is obliged to inquire because _she _expects it of him, "what were they?"

"All in due time," she says, victorious, pleased about witholding things from him. _Powerful. _"Enough talking for today. We wouldn't want to jeopardize your recovery, would we?"

"I guess we wouldn't," he says and that's the only thin they sincerely agree about. He has to get better to discover who he is and what the hell has happened to him no matter what this woman, _Kelly, _is trying to say.

His name is Michael and he is content about it when he manages to sit upright on his bed and put his feet on the floor. The slippers he wears are ugly and can only be produced for a hospital. From the new position he conquered after hours of useless trying, he can see through the open window. It is high up. The wall behind it in the open, over a courtyard, seems very smooth. There is no safe way to get out through the window without falling badly. He asks himself why he is studying ways to run away in everything he sees and he is hopelessly unable to answer that question.

He is on the top floor of a building towering over green forest surroundings behind the perimeter of a tall thick wall, layered with expensive white stone slabs to look ancient and built out of old fashioned masonry blocks, but he knows that this is only a ruse for concrete and other modern materials. Over the wall, there is a green meadow where a child is playing. It's a boy but he cannot see his face. The boy is too far. Soon there is a red haired woman with the child. She's wearing a yellow top and blue jeans in which she looks absolutely stunning. _She would be beautiful in anything,_ he thinks. The image is pleasing beyond anything he has seen since he woke up. He wiggles his toes in excitement and wonders who she is and if he will ever see her from close by.

The rest of the day passes in trying to make his body to work again, and unwillingly learning every stripe and crevice on the walls of his room, sterile and empty, apart from his bed, of which he now knows every screw and metal bar, and odd instruments that still surround it. He knows how all the instruments look in great detail but he has no idea what most of them _do. _And that scares him a great deal.

He wishes at least Kelly would come to see him but no one does. Food is brought in regularly, every time by a different serving man, who puts it on his bed table, waits for him to finish and takes it away.

At night he dreams of flames, and of driving away from them. But no matter how fast he pushes the car, the fire is always on his heels.

xxxxxxxx

**Somewhere in Panama**

"Paul," Lincoln acknowledges his unexpected guest wondering what made the famous congressman fly all the way to Panama.

"Lincoln," the politician in question says without further ado, occupying one of the kitchen chairs no one offered him, "we have to find Sara."

"Sara is OK," Lincoln insists, "she called me the other day. Her new job seems to be interesting."

"Listen to me," Kellerman says with a voice of an elite paid killer Lincoln hasn't heard from him for a while. He certainly doesn't use it for TV and other media appearances. "I have reasons to believe that her employer is an old _associate_ of mine.

"What, Paul," Lincoln enjoys annoying the man considering _he _is already thoroughly bothered in the middle of his own kitchen in the middle of the night. "Have you turned paranoid in the old age?"

"Some say that paranoid keeps you alive," Kellerman comments putting a job add press clipping on Linc's kitchen table.

"The clinic of St Agatha in Montana," he says lazily as if that could mean something to Lincoln. "The address and the phone number is not listed in any phone book of our goddamn country. The commercials for rich patients who go there mention nothing about who is running it or its tax number."

"So what," Lincoln still does not want to believe that there could be anything wrong. Sara deserves to be happy after everything that has happened to them, if happiness is still possible for her without Michael. It has to be possible because that was what his brother would have wished for, so Lincoln lives, and lives well, to honor his last wish.

As a final proof, Kellerman spreads a map of Montana on the table. "Look," he says, "this is the estimated location of the clinic, from my less savoury sources." Lincoln doesn't have to ask what these sources are. The agents who serve the country without much regard for its laws, and Kellerman was one of them, not so long ago. Men who would kill you if you make a wrong move. Or even if you don't. Or out of pleasure. It was sometimes hard to tell what the reasons were. Or if there were any.

Lincoln can only stare at the map. The clinic is north of Helena, Montana, maybe an hour away at normal driving speed. But there is another place not too far away from the clinic either, further up north, maybe another two hours of driving, maybe less, a place he had visited with his brother when he was a death row convict on the run from justice. A place where a woman he loved in the past died, not deserving of her fate.

_Blackfoot, Montana._

"Let me make a few phone calls," Lincoln says and chases Sofia who tries to walk in on them at that moment back out to their living room.

It's almost 1 o'clock in the morning, but people don't go to bed early in Mexico, or in Panama, or in any place he likes well, so he calls Sucre first.

"What do you want, _papi?" _their friend picks up the phone, slightly annoyed.

"There has been a development," Linc says, "Sara may be in trouble."

"What, where?" the singing voice goes all nervous over the phone.

"Let's meet in two days," Linc says. "In Helena, Montana."

Kellerman smiles with satisfaction when Mahone is the next one who answers the phone.

They will all meet. Like in the good old times. _Well, good is a matter of perception, _Lincoln remembers.

"Can your career stand such long absence?" Linc ask his guest, having trouble to locate coffee in his own kitchen. He can't make good coffee but he should best try, decided that no one would get any sleep that night.

"I called in sick," Paul yawns and makes a crooked smile,

waving to Sofia to come in when she shows up again. He took a private flight to arrive to Panama that evening after a week of getting upset about Kelly's plans and digging everything he could about her clinic. Amounting to nothing much. And not a single mildly incriminating thing. Which makes him even more worried about her intentions.

No one will sleep.

"And this associate of yours? How is he?" Linc asks as the smell of coffee _finally _fills up the kitchen making it more homely.

"She," Paul says quietly, "it's a she."

As if that should explain everything.

"Are you sure that she will _harm _Sara?"

"I am not sure of anything. Except that she is dangerous, unpredictable and capable of being more brutal than I ever was."

Coming from a man who nearly drowned Sara in a sink of a hotel room, it is a lot to take.

"I see," Lincoln says, deciding to take one piece of information at the time. "And she was your... boss? Colleague agent? Whatever you call yourselves?"

"Worse," Paul shakes his head.

_How much worse can it get?_ Linc thinks but for once, he keeps it to himself. If Kellerman is telling the truth, they will need his help to get to the bottom of the matter. And Michael is no longer with them to have a plan.

"She was his girlfriend," Sofia says in her warm southern accent Lincoln had grown to love more than anything. _Well, almost anything. _He would still give anything at all to hear Michael's voice again and know that, by some miracle, their family is whole again. "How can you tell?" he asks his girlfriend and even in asking he knows that she is right as usual. Sofia has a third, or a fourth eye when it comes to people, their less canny feelings included.

"She was," Paul admits. "It didn't end very well."

"How did it end?" the question pops out and Lincoln regrets it immediately because the answer makes him even more worried about Sara than humanly possible.

"She put a bullet in my head," Paul says. "I survived."

_Unfortunately, _Lincoln thinks, involuntarily, pouring coffee to his unwanted guest in the middle of the night.

"Can you give us a ride?" he asks Paul.

"My plane has left," Kellerman says without further explanation, "we'll take a regular one in the morning."

Sofia already switched the laptop on and is browsing the last minute flight offers.

"Here," she says when she finds it.

They drink their coffee.

And no one sleeps.


	3. The Gardener

**Chapter 3. The Gardener**

**A cheap hotel, somewhere in Helena, Montana**

It's 30 degrees in shade and the air-conditioning is not working properly. Too bad for the others. Sucre doesn't like it too much either, but the warm weather makes him feel almost like home.

"That's crazy," Kellerman tells him, and Lincoln seems to agree. But Sucre doesn't_. _He strongly disagrees. They don't know. They have no idea. What it means when some evil people threaten _again_ the girl of your best friend who died, and who helped you write love letters from prison to your own girl. _Passion, _he remembers the word still today.

Today, when Maricruz is his wife and she loves him, with _passion, _and everything that is left of Michael is a classy tomb stone, his widow, and his son.

"No, it's not," he says, "if this stupid hospital wants a gardener, they will get a good one. I like plants! I'm good with them. Besides, your ex," he shoots at Kellerman, "she can always refuse me on an interview."

"If Kelly has Sara on purpose, and I have no doubt that she does," Kellerman explains slowly as if Sucre was an idiot only because he's Puerto Rican by origin, "she has done her homework and knows who you are. She will suspect something."

"Good for her," Sucre says decisively, "so first she gets all suspicious and a bit afraid, and then she knows."

"Knows what?" asks Lincoln who can be much more dense than Sucre himself despite never even visiting Puerto Rico.

"That Sara is not alone," he tells them both.

And Sucre believes that they finally may begin to understand.

xxxxxxxxx

**St. Agatha's ward for incurable patients**

It's the day he makes his first step, four days after he woke up and they had been _monitoring _him all the time. He feels like a newborn, bare feet on the synthetic covered floor, clear in color, cleaned out to the point that the cleanliness is sickening, smooth and slippery, or it would be, when wet. He walks barefoot, this time purposefully ignoring the slippers that have been made ready for him under the metallic legs of the bed. Walking feels more real when the toes he still has can touch the floor.

Everything is prepared for him in this place and it is irritating.

His thin feet that have forgotten how to walk in the years that he was asleep take him real slow to the window. To the light. Always. He doesn't know why darkness frightens him so then, but he believes it always may have. Maybe someone had locked him up in a cellar as a child, or maybe that has happened to someone else, and he has just read about it, or watched it on TV, and was never able to forget it.

His effort is well rewarded, and the patient who was told his name was Michael, smiles.

Over the high wall, down below, he can see her again, and it is more than worth the dull ache in the unused muscles of his body. Blue jeans, black T-shirt, probably with three tiny buttons under her long neck, first two unbuttoned, he thinks. _Yellow would be better, _he assesses_. _She is in a hurry to run away from him and get into the building. Then again, she has no idea he has been watching her, the day before, or right now, and he's way too far up to yell her to stop. She would never hear him. So he just hopes that if he sees her the next day she might wear the yellow top that reveals her shoulders. For some reason it would make him happy.

**Behind the glass, watching the patient No 113477**

The glass is bulletproof and clear, on their side, while the patient, standing at the window, can see what's behind him only as a concrete wall. If he would look, that is, because he's carelessly looking out, adjusting his blue-green eyes to the sunlight.

"He's doing better every day," the man says behind the glass, and Kelly makes a step backward.

"Like I told you," she replies, tired of explaining herself to men she is working with. Fed up with explaining anything to people in general. Now or before.

"Are you sure than he is up to the task?"

_My lucky day, _she thinks. The questions just keep coming. There's nothing to stop them.

"Let's put it this way," she says and hopes it makes it somewhat clearer to her associate, "I believe he's one of the few people who's actually smarter than me. And it's a lot to say."

"You were not able to get me out of here, or out of the previous place where they had been holding me, for all your charade with the government," the man complains, nervously arranging and rearranging his thick greying hair behind his not so small ears.

"Quite right, " Kelly has to agree, "unless you want to provide the government with the access to the data they want. Then they will move you to the facility from which you can easily escape yourself. That deal still stands."

"No way," the man replies.

"Just as I thought," she answers automatically, turning her eyes to Michael again because she doesn't feel like looking at her colleague who can sometimes be so annoying. Yes, she is not imagining it, most unfortunately, the migraine is beginning to form in her right temple, merciless and never missing a moment. In Kelly's case migraine is the only certain thing in life next to dying.

To try and stop it, or to at least delay the onset of the pain, her mind begins to wonder if Paul is already in the city and which one of the surviving Fox River Nine will present himself for the interview for the position of the gardener. Lincoln? The Mexican guy? Or the former agent transformed into addict and rogue officer, the one who has changed sides more times than he knows. It would amuse her if Mahone would be her gardener. Because Kelly has also switched sides more frequently than she can count and the only things she care about it now is the fact that she is working for herself.

"You sure that bringing in all these people he knows will help our cause?"

Kelly almost quotes a medical textbook in her next reply: "In a case of partial or total loss of memory, bringing objects, or even more favourably, persons, that have been in close contact with the patient before the accident, can be beneficial to his regaining the knowledge of himself, and the normality of the behaviour."

"I'd never suspect you for wanting to help him," the man teases her.

"You know me too well, Ralph," she smirks back and sees him flinch at her use of his real name. Very few people would know _that. _She smiles innocently, waving away a short strand of sweaty black hair from her nose, and than she bites with her words, real hard, "it will also manipulate him into believing the conditions we want him to believe in. Unless you want to subscribe to the new treatment programme I will soon run in this institution. That would also present a way of escape. Albeit somewhat unconventional…"

The looking glass gets a bit murky on the edges and she makes a mental note to tell the cleaning staff to polish it. Perhaps she should publish an add to hire more of those, but she doesn't want to make what she wants too obvious to Paul. He isn't that stupid, after all. If a bit limited in Kelly's opinion. Even if the idea of him applying for the cleaning job is positively hilarious and pleasing to the extreme. Maybe the closed ward would need a plumber. _That_ idea is so outrageously funny that it almost helps against her mounting headache.

"I will leave that pleasure to your other patients, my dear," Ralph says and, luckily, just like it began, the conversation is over. He had had enough of her for the day and he retires willingly to his room, or cell, to call the things by their name.

Pain killers must be in her drawer, she hopes as she runs down the spiral stairs connecting the two wards, and as she applies proper cards, codes and procedures to the doors on both sides. She doesn't want her daughter to see her with migraine when she comes back home. It's not the crazy mommy she wants, or needs. It's a nice reasonable reassuring woman who has left her problems behind.

Kelly is very much determined to be that woman, if only for her daughter.

xxxxxxx

**A schoolyard somewhere in Helena, Montana**

She brings Mikey to school before going to work. It's only his second day but he immediately hugs a black girl who is a brought by a rather corpulent African lady in her early forties. The woman smiles at her daughter.

"I'm Sara," she tells the mother of her son's new friend, still amazed that he could open up so fast to someone who is not family. Then again, her son doesn't have to be like his parents in that regard, both of them rather introvert in their early childhood as far as she knows. _The children are like themselves, _ she knows it, but seeing it for real is troubling and an immense source of motherly relief at the same time. _He will not repeat my mistakes. I just have to help him not to make too many of his own._

"Esperança," the woman smiles in a simple friendly way introducing herself. "And this is Miss Maria Adelaide, but we call her Adelaide."

"Nice name," Sara says, "my son is called Michael, but we call him Mikey."

"I'd say that's a nice and a short name too!" Esperança comments and the innocent exchange cements Sara's irrational belief that she has done very well by coming to Montana. _Mikey will have friends, real friends, not only family,_she gets completely elated and overjoyed at the thought.

Her son will have the life he deserves, she will make sure of that, a normal easy life where people love him. _Even if he doesn't have a father._

"Well, maybe I'll see you later," she tells Esperança before driving away, Mikey not making any problems in being left alone in a company of his new friend. "I make good pancakes," Esperança offers immediately, "you can come and try them some day."

"Why not?" Sara says but she knows it will take her a bit more time before she trusts the large woman and her daughter that much.

Sara's first day at work is as uninteresting as the weather is too beautiful to be true. There are two patients for routine check-up upon admittance to the clinic, both healthy as the fish. And while she's certainly not an expert, the only psychological trouble they seem to be suffering from is the dissatisfaction of the rich: of people who have seen all the world entirely too soon. So that when they are only a little bit older than Sara is now, there is nothing left to explore any more in their opinion. She doesn't like the attitude but she's able to understand it. She was able to feel it when she was younger and before she started using.

Food is not bad in St Agatha's she thinks after her lunch when she almost dozes on her desk, head falling down in front of the computer screen. _Like in the first months of pregnancy, _she remembers. But she is not expecting now, and she probably never will.

Being idle, she remembers hurrying to arrive on time that morning, it's never easy with school, she should have known that. She unbuttoned her T-shirt before getting out of the car, and as she rushed forward on the cobble-stoned covered path between the parking lot and the main entrance. She knows it's her imagination, but it felt as if someone had been watching her from afar.

It's not a frightening feeling, and in the stupor of the digestion she fantasises how that someone would have looked a bit like Michael, and her thoughts drift further to the blue-green gaze observing her keenly through the fence of Fox River, long ago, as she turns back and smiles…

Sun is a tricky thing and Sara falls asleep.

When she's awake, her silly thoughts are forgotten. She has another appointment to do her job, and than she can go home to her son, and hope that the dinner she intends to make will not get burned.

xxxxxxxx

**Kelly's Office, St. Agatha**

"A former inmate?" the Chief Executive Officer of St Agatha clinic comments on Fernando Sucre's CV as if she was asking for the color of his eyes or his middle name.

"Yes," Sucre confirms because there's no use in denying it. They've been all over the newspapers and on the TV when it all happened. The Fox River 9. "Freed of all charges."

"I see," the black haired woman gives him an uneasy look. "In case that the Board of Governors which I still have to consult on this particular contract accepts that I can hire you, how soon could you start?"

"Well, now?" he says wondering why she doesn't have the autonomy of decision in employing people as she well should. Her next words provoke an uncanny feeling in Sucre that Ms Kelly Davis can read minds. _This is not a good thing, _he concludes and makes a sign of the cross, just in case.

"You are right in wondering why I cannot make this decision myself. I will be coming right to that," she clarifies, taking in his gesture with an amusement of a non believer. "You see, Mr Sucre, there is a particular condition linked to the position of a gardener which we have not been able to disclose in the add due to some confidentiality matters. Should you accept the position, you would be required to sign a confidentiality and a non-disclosure statement."

"Excuse me, Madam," Fernando asks, "but what secret can there be with maintaining a garden?"

"It's not about what you will do, it's where you will do it," she explains further.

"I am listening," he says, recalling Kellerman's description of the woman, and with every passing moment he's feeling less and less comfortable in her presence. He had had contacts with Gretchen Morgan in his previous life, but this _Kelly_ _Davies _looks incredibly more dangerous. And smart. He reminds him of someone but Sucre is unable to pinpoint who it was. _Maybe I will remember later, _he dismisses the idea, even if it makes him curious.

"This clinic has another ward, Mr Sucre, one whose existence we are not advertising in the newspapers. It's called the ward for incurable patients. What is more, only people who hold a clearance to work in it know of its existence. Two-thirds of the garden that you should take care of are situated in that part of the clinic, closed to the general public."

"Incurable, how?" he asks. He will do this for Sara, but he would rather not listen to the terminal patients dying throes if he doesn't have to. It brings bad luck.

"Mainly crazy," she informs him, "and a few other conditions of chronic diseases that you have probably never heard about."

"Would I have any contact with this crazy or ill people?" _Would Sara? _he thinks but he cannot finish his question. It's one thing to let this Kelly be suspicious, but another to confirm her doubts.

"Not at all, your business would be primarily with the garden. The non-disclosure statement would be about not revealing to anyone that this part of the clinic exists and to mind your own business. Written in roughly 5000 words of legal language, but the essence is that…" she finishes cynically.

_Why do they all think of me as stupid? Well, I am a bit, but not as they think, _Sucre gets angry but he keeps his pride down. Being underestimated can be an advantage when you deal with real criminals and murderers pretending to be good looking doctors, and that is who this Kelly Davis might be. Even if he cannot really blame her for putting a bullet in Kellerman's head. Fernando would never pull a trigger on a gun, but he can see the appeal of shooting that man. Jesus knows that he must have deserved it for everything he has done in life.

"I could agree to that," he grins and she smiles back.

The pen is at hand, and just like that, it's done.

It's not only Sara, it's Fernando Sucre who has a brand new job as well.

xxxxxxxxxxx

**St. Agatha's ward for incurable patients**

The straw hat is large and almost friendly. In any case it doesn't repulse him as it should. There is some kind of transparent white tissue hanging from it on all sides. It looks like a net that could have been used in the old times to collect honey from the bees if he is not very much wrong. The thin veil would hide his face but it could even be comfortable to wear in a too warm weather outside. He also gets a grey T-Shirt and simple black trousers, laid out ready next to his back.

"Thank you," he says to the caretaker who brought them, hoping it means they would let him out, but the man doesn't reply. _Are they forbidden to talk to me? _he thinks. It appears so. Maybe it's part of a strategy to make him go well and truly crazy and do some more terrible things, _for them, in their service. _If it is true what the doctor has said that he had done terrible things before.

Soon, Kelly, he remembers the name of the female doctor, comes to see him.

"Your condition is still delicate," she informs him. "After your cerebral injury, you should not expose your head to the sun, at all. Do you understand?"

He nods despite that he doesn't. Understand, that is. There is so much he doesn't understand but one day he will. He just has to have a little faith. _Have a little faith?_ Who has said that? The words hurt as if a surgical knife had cut his head open right at that moment without any anaesthetic to make it any more bearable.

"Have a little faith," he parrots, and the doctor narrows her eyes.

"What did you just say?" she asks. "Who told you that?"

"Huh, nothing, I mean, no one," he denies everything. "It must be this head injury thing, I guess, phrases just pop up in my mind and some of them want out. This is all a bit overwhelming, doc. Being asleep, waking up, and all that."

"I understand," she says, but she still doesn't believe him. If she has ever believed him to start with. _It doesn't matter, _he thinks. He doesn't need anyone to believe in him. Least of all Kelly.

"Does this mean," he starts pointing at the hat to change the topic, "does this mean I can go out?"

"Tomorrow," she agrees, her not so ugly face sour about something, hand rushing to one of her temples. "You will find that our garden is quite beautiful. You just have to have a little patience."

With that, Kelly leaves. His fingers itch for a piece of paper. He knows he would fold it in a shape of a bird, but he doesn't know how he knows that. It's maddening. Then maybe, when he goes out tomorrow, he could leave the bird somewhere on the path of the beautiful woman he is seeing. Maybe she would like it, too.

There are plenty of useless things in his room, and he knows them all by heart, but there is no paper.

He can't go out just yet so he involuntarily scans his room again, as if he didn't know every corner of it twice all over already. His methodical insight focuses on the smallest something on the wall behind his bed, behind his back when he's looking through the window. _It's a wall, right? _ he asks himself all of a sudden. _And what if it isn't?_

An uncontrolled impulse to check it is very strong. So he positions himself in front of the window, letting the sun shine on him, and cast a much larger shadow than the size of his body on that back wall, in the afternoon when the shadows grow longer, and the heat more oppressive despite the functioning air conditioning in his perfectly sterile room. He stays like that for ages, and he knows, he knows only too well that he is being watched. Monitored. This doesn't fill him with fear, but with the desire to be smarter than the people watching. He believes that he can be, head injury of not.

He turns sideways to the sun, and his shadow shifts on the floor of the room and the back wall. When it does, the colour of the wall changes on one place. It doesn't last very long, it's only a fleeting moment, but it is _there_.

The wall is not the wall. It's more likely a window, or a looking glass. Camouflaged but real. He has read of those constructions, very specialised, and for very specialised state institutions. Very few private companies would be able to afford them although he guesses some rich corporations could.

_But probably not any smaller company, or individual hospital, which would be into honest business_, he thinks. Again, he doesn't know how he knows it, but he knows he is right.

And his latest revelation does give him creeps. _What is this place? _he thinks, helpless. _Never mind, _he tells himself. _I am here now, and I will find out._

Methodically, he applies his peculiar gift of observation to willingly record information about every single thing in a room, understanding that the unwanted clarity and too detailed perception that _is naturally his _even when he doesn't want to have it, could also become his tool.

His only weapon.

If what he starts to believe is true and _no one _in this place is his friend.

Then again, he doesn't know who he is and it well may be that outside that place he has no friends either. _Five years, _he thinks, _that is how long I slept. _Why hasn't anyone come looking for him? Or maybe they did, but they didn't know where he was.

He tries the hat on and it fits perfectly. He will proceed one step at the time. The grey T-shirt does too and it looks like something he had worn before.

It is pointless to worry. He will try and take everything one step at the time.


	4. New Friends, Old Friends

**Chapter 4. New Friends, Old Friends**

**Supermarket in Helena, Montana**

Kelly had taken too many things from the shiny shelves of a small local supermarket, and the paper bag was going to be way too heavy for her to carry to the car. Short of statures, she always suffered the consequences. There were no people queuing to pay, only a skinny employee who didn't look as having reached legal age to work. Her headache hasn't turned any better since the night before.

_Some surgeon that I am, _she thought, _unable to fix my own migraines. _There were worse things than migraines but she didn't want to dwell on that. If she hurried, she had to hurry, she could then still see her beautiful adopted daughter before Esperança would drive her to the local school. Last night she told her about the little friend she had made already, all enthusiastic, a blond boy with blue eyes. _At least someone is happy about living in the middle of nowhere, _Kelly considered, eager to go somewhere else, as usual. Although she knew quite well that for her, there was no good place to be.

When people met Esperança, no one suspected she could drive, or speak English properly. They suspected even less that she could have interviewed a psychopath prisoner in Fox River and secure his transfer to St Agatha's for further observation in an extremely smart way. Kelly laughed at how good everything was going. Michael was going to meet Ralph soon, and if she was lucky, she could still go on vacation she planned in Africa in September. Adelaide might like to see for a while the country where she was born.

Lost in thoughts and with a smile on her lips, she ventured out to the empty parking lot, hitting a solid something. She imagined all her stuff on the floor, but the thing, or rather, the person, she could not tell, due to the bright morning sun and galloping headache, secured the paper bag, way kinder to her groceries than he has ever been to her.

"Kelly," a voice says, accomplished.

_Oh no, _Kelly Davis thought, _not this early for God's sake..._

"It's so nice to see you again," he said in a false concerned tone he would use before torturing people. Kelly was not the one to tease. Her left foot was in his crotch and soon she was sprinting down the parking lot and out of his way. She only managed to get her food in the backpack of her car before he caught up with her, again.

_Not as fast as I used to be, am I? _she was angry with herself, turning her head backwards and all the way up to face Paul Kellerman. She would always forget how much taller he was. Or how short she was in general. _Poison is sold in small bottles, _ she remembered and she liked herself again.

"And I was so hoping to see you apply for a position of my gardener," she said, seeing that her tactics of running away failed miserably.

"Why?" he was puzzled. A bit. _Excellent, _she thought.

Unceremoniously, she pulled his pants down, and tried another approach out of her situation glad for the empty parking lot. Where no one would be watching her giving a blow job to her ex. The shop window was too far away for anyone to see them from there, between the car and some sort of fence. It looked like a great place to park when she came, close to the exit to the road. Doing _that_ would have always worked with Paul in the early days of their acquaintance. Soon she was down on the back seat just like she wanted, _both _Paul's hands busy peeling off her jeans. Her body zoomed in a completely different tune than her conscious mind, because it was _Paul, _and for a second she regretted it. Regretted a lost opportunity to actually let herself go.

But it was only for a second. She didn't have more time than that.

Faster than a snake, she pulled the gun hidden under the passenger seat and pressed it on his temple, ready to use.

"I _will_ do it again," she said, very focused, wondering how she must have looked. _As a murderous bitch, _she thought. _Precisely what I am._

"I know, baby, I know," he said, his dark eyes unusually open and not sheltering any deceit. Which was perhaps the worst deceit of all.

"Get away from me," she said. It wasn't an idle threat.

Her aim remained certain as he walked away. She'd not start driving until he was far enough gone.

He had the cheek to call out to her, over the entire parking lot, like a boy of 18: "I could come to your fancy office, you know, how about Friday evening? I'm sure you have... _safeguards_ there against intruders like me. You could cook!"

"Deal," she said, not believing her own words.

She was miraculously home on time to see Adelaide to school.

And her head had stopped from hurting.

Xxxxxxxxx

**Garden of the closed ward in St Agatha**

One of the attendants let him out in a small square yard, twenty by twenty feet, if. Green grass covered the small plot of land , and next to the wall there was a garden patch with two roses, growing. They were not very high and they have not yet flowered in the season despite all the sun and warm weather.

Another man squatted in one of the corners, on the ground, as far away from the flowers as possible. Michael wore the large straw hate covering his face, where the other one was bare faced, wrinkled, once black shaggy hair greying visibly. Clever grey eyes glowed above a sharp hooked nose and the lips were curved up.

The man seemed to be enjoying the sun.

"Hello, son," he told him, "I'm Roger. And who would you be?"

"Michael," he answered, still unsure if that was his name. He guessed it was as good as any other.

"In for what? Robbery where they can't found the millions you stole? Murder? A serial kill?"

"I was ill," Michael said, "a woman told me I had done terrible things but I don't seem to remember them. What are you in for?"

Michael decided that asking the same thing back may give him some answers as to what the calm looking man was talking about.

"Oh, I'm innocent," the man who called himself Roger said, "but that's what everyone always says in here, and most of them aren't. Your response was at least a bit original, son."

"I'm not sure if the world original applies," Michael said smiling dryly under the net covering his face.

The bell chimed on the inside. A different attendant, more muscular and dangerous looking appeared from the inside and walked to Roger. "Time is up, old man," he told him.

"Wait a second," Roger commanded, waving Michael to approach. "Come, son."

Michael went as he was asked, curious. It was the first person who actually talked to him after the woman, Kelly. The attendant immediately obliged Roger to follow, using a _straight jacket_, Michael observed, when he occupied the old man's place next to the wall. In the grey smooth surface constructed to appear old, there was a small damage at the level with a waist of a grown up person. When Roger squatted next to it, it must have been in his eyesight. Some kind of electrical wiring must have also been running through the state of the art reinforced concrete, a feature Michael did not notice in the walls of his room. _The external wall, _ he thought, eager to cross it. _But where to go? _he thought, _ there is nowhere I can go._

Roger was meanwhile ushered deeply inside the building. A muted but a distinguished grunt came from there. Followed by Roger's scream, even deeper on the inside. Michael shivered. _What have they done to him? _So far the attendants have been kind to Michael. _I should have helped him, _a compulsive need was getting a shape in Michael's almost empty mind. _Emptied, _he thought with hatred. _That's what they have all done to me. They emptied my mind_

His discontent didn't last long. More curious about the little fissure, that should not have been there, than about the destiny of his new _friend, _Michael squatted to, pressing a single blue-green eye at the correct spot. The opening widened after its beginning. Gaining a few inches in diameter it ran through the entire width of the wall, which was not that thick, or not that thick at that place, four foot at the most, maybe less. It overlooked a pathway and a larger green meadow where the beautiful woman would pass when she came and went every day.

Michael felt like he was back to school again, hoping she would pass at any moment. _Have I ever gone to school? _He wondered and he could not remember.

The only thing he could see was grass, green and growing.

"Hello" he said but the sound did not travel very far through the hole, contrary to the laws of physics. At the very edge of his vision there was a driveway and a cabin of the guard. He grabbed the hole with his hands and tried to blow the words through it as if he was playing an odd instrument.

"Hello," he said again, and a hoarse distorted sound may have come forth, all the way into the open.

It was as if his whisper had the power to call her, for there she was, in a hurry again, in _that _yellow top he wanted to see. She halted in front of the wall where he was and looked around, uncertain.

"Hello," he rolled the word again, through his hands cupping his mouth and the hole, howling through the wall, and out into the world.

"Who's there?" she said and she was bewildered, he could tell, while she appeared calm.

Than Kelly was also there, ruining the moment, confident and black haired where the stunning woman was gentle, her soft hair falling down her back in auburn glowing waves.

"Most of our patients believe to hear the ghosts at this wall," Kelly said. "The builders said it's the positioning of this wall and the natural wind flow in this area, it hums and makes you imagine voices. I didn't take you to be superstitious on the interview."

"I'm not," the gentle voice replied, somewhat more confident. "It's just that... I don't know."

"I want you to see a special patient today," Kelly said. "He's very rich and extravagant. He'll be wearing a hat when you see him. You should just check him as the others, without looking at his face. It's for the best if you don't talk.

"Oh well, I guess weird demands come with the money. If the person is not unpleasant, I can live with strange personal demands," Sara said, unconcerned.

"I was hoping you'd say that, Sara," Kelly said, "I knew that we were going to be such good friends.

_Sara, _he admired the name as if it was once his treasured possession. The steps echoed behind him and he slumped in the grass before one of the many friendly attendants, who all appeared so similar to Michael, accompanied him to a different room, windowless, the path to it different than to his usual room. _They are trying to prevent me to compose a map of premises in my head, _ he realized, uncertain if he could have done such a thing... Or not. Different attendance, different corridor to go to his room, or any other place, every time he walked.

_A patient with the hat, _he realized why he was there. _Me._

xxxxxxxxx

And indeed, in short time that lasts like a lifetime, Sara walks in. She checks him out in a well-practised way, ignoring his mask, only giving a look or two to the grey T-shirt he wore.

"You are fine, mister," she says, "I don't suppose you will talk."

And he didn't. He didn't know what to tell her. _Hello, I'm Michael. I don't really know who I am or why I am here. I've been looking at you for two days and you are beautiful._

There are papers in the pocket of her white doctor coat. He points at them when she is observing him, as well.

"You want a piece of paper?" she says "I guess there's no harm in giving you one. I still have to take your blood pressure and than we're done."

He stretches his arm towards her and his heartbeat increases five-fold when she mechanically proceeds in her activity.

"Somewhat higher than it should be," she says. "Any particular reason for that?"

_You, _he thinks, but the words are not coming.

"I understand, no talking," she says, resigned, taking notes of her findings, neatly putting away the medical gear she brought in the bag. They are in the otherwise empty room with a metallic table and two wooden chairs that do not go very well with it. An oddity, of source.

He gestures towards the paper again.

"Ok," she said, giving him one, continuing to arrange her things, one finger twiddling with a long lock of hair, confidently. She is not nervous. She is simply at ease.

His fingers attack the paper while she is working, until a white paper bird has come to life in his hands. It is delicate and fragile, like Sara. _Trustworthy, _he knows.

When she stands up to leave, he backs as well, cheeks hot, hands sweaty. He still can't walk very well so he limps to the door faster than he should, stumbling.

She is immediately on guard, searching for some phone or button she must have to call for help if the patients were misbehaving.

But when he stretches out his palm, and she has seen it, her eyes widen as he had never seen them before, in a mixture of surprise and hope, mingled with extreme reticence and fear.

She glances around checking if there are hidden cameras in the room before she writes a few words on another empty paper, as a doctor taking note of her findings.

But the papers speaks differently. _Behind the wall? Was it you?_ it says. The edge of his straw hat nods, his head too far under to be seen.

She accepts the bird and proceeds, indifferently, to the door, passing next to him as if he was an office plant. A desire to stop her by force washes over him but he would never have any of that.

_Have I really done terrible things, as Roger said all people here did? Was I a serial killer? _He didn't think so, but it was possible, his violent impulse a proof that he might have been something like that.

Ashamed, he recoils back to his chair, on wobbly legs.

"Take it easy," she tells him from the door, in a tone a professional doctor should use. "The key to recovery after the surgery as Dr Davis described is to take it slow. She will further advise

you on your condition tomorrow."

The paper bird was nesting safely in her hands and the last thing he had seen of her was a lingering smile.

xxxxx

**Doctor's Office**

The origami bird was on her desk again and so were the memories she wanted to forget. She wanted to imagine the bird was different but she knew it was exactly the same as Michael would have made it. Maybe there was no other way to fold an origami crane. In her head, one more time of too many, the world exploded, she walked away and Michael died. The next thing to crush down was a silly hope.

_It is impossible_, she tells herself and she believes it instantly. Michael could not have been the only person in the world obsessed with origami. _Michael would have spoken to me if it had been him, _she laughs bitterly at her short-liver illusion, fried on the flames of implacable logic. _He would know me. _Unless, unless he was afraid. Unless something was going on again. Something he wanted to protect her from. _Come on, Sara, _she scorns herself. It would be too good to be true. So far, they have never lived a conspiracy that would bring them together instead of bringing them apart.

She examines the bird for flaws, for differences. There aren't any, she concludes again. Than she studies the garbage can, and the container to separate hazardous medical waste. Than the closet containing needles and other stuff she'd better not even consider. She stares at the garbage can again.

Her computer beeps, fortunately. A remainder, a daily one. In exactly 15 minutes she has to go to the parking lot and drive to school to pick up her son. There is no one who can do it for her. Routine takes over. Clean the desk, close the files, go to the toilet, get going. Above all, get going. Being a mother is a wonderful thing. It gives this whole lot of obligations preventing a grown up woman to go all crazy with her thoughts.

She hurries to reach the car, keys already in hand. But in the bottom of her mind she still knows it, even when she tries to convince herself that what she did was unconscious. The bird remains safely under her computer screen, and she purposefully put it over there, not throwing it away as she should have done. It would be there tomorrow as well. It is unfair. She cannot go on having fantasies about unknown men because they remind her of her deceased husband.

And in her dreams that night, Michael looks after her, like an angel of the underworld, all smart and sad, and unreal, so unreal, wearing a stupid straw hat. _Move on, _he tells her. She can't. She is decided to throw away the bird the next day.

Keeping it would be a treason to his memory. One day she might be able to move on.

But it is not that day.

xxxxxxx

**Kelly's private office, top floor, St Agatha's, late at night**

"It may be a bit far fetched," Ralph says, sipping a very old whiskey, and Kelly reminds herself she should call him Roger. Her private office is the only place in St Agatha's where secrets can be spoken freely. _Some of them at least, _she considered. She had swiped the room clean herself. No cameras, no listening devices, no electronic devices and no access to internet. Thick walls and a view of the forest through a very long horizontal window on one of the walls, closer to the ceiling than to the floor, in very odd proportions for standard architectonic planning.

"Wait to see Mr Morris," she tells him, pouring a glass of whiskey to herself, ignoring a fatherly disapproving look Roger (_Ralph_) gives her. _You are no relative of mine, _she tells him mentally, _merely an associate, and there is a difference. _Out loud, she continues:"Poor man," she sniffs, and Roger laugh heartily when she explains further: "He will give a marvellous performance not knowing to be a guinea pig. From that point on it is only a matter of time before Michael considers you to be unjustly condemned to death, or worse."

"I just don't look that much like Lincoln."

"You don't have to," Kelly says, downing a large portion of alcohol down her already burning throat, "I paid the best shrinks to do estimates on this: we only have to roughly simulate the situation for him to do exactly what he did in Fox River"

"Is that why his wife looks exactly like his wife?" Roger says cynically.

"He has no idea who she is," Kelly dismisses the argument, finishing her drink, "but I hope he'll have the same reaction to her as in Fox River. The shrinks say it would help the emotional truthfulness and give credibility to the simulated situation."

"Simulated? That's what you told the shrinks?" Roger is convinced now, and it makes Kelly happy because Ralph, her boss, can be so annoying when he's unhappy. _Extremely _annoying.

"I couldn't very well tell them the truth, could I?" Kelly stretches on the sofa and she wishes to go home, drunk driving on not. On the second thought, better not. But she had not been dismissed, not yet.

"I should go back before the recording devices notice my absence," Roger says, "and hey, when you cook for you ex, shouldn't you do it in some tapped room rather than here? He was quite a competent killer, wasn't he?"

"He still is," Kelly smiles with appreciation, "and it's great to know that you're tapping my car, just in case I may once need your outside guns to help me for real."

"Just don't let him in here," he tells her before leaving and it's an order, and she hates herself for regretting a lost opportunity. _To do what? Get laid and possibly murdered? How perverted can you get, Kelly? Ralph is right about this, and about many other things._

It has been a long day and Kelly Davis can finally go home. Trying to ignore the passing of days. And the fact that her rusting cooking skills will soon be put to a test. _ I might order sushi, _she thinks of a food Paul loathes, and she knows that she won't order it. With everything they have been through, she finds that she doesn't hate him nowhere nearly enough. _Not yet, _she tells herself, knowing he will not be nice to her either way. Esperança is still awake when she comes home, and Adelaide played with that nice boy again. There is a message from Morris on her answering machine. _Luckily, for everything, there is a plan_, she concludes and the notion calms her down. When Kelly falls asleep, still not completely sober from her day and her late evening cups, she thinks how easy life is.

When there are no Fridays.

xxxxx

A/N Just corrected some typos. A review would be nice to see if this story is to anyone's liking. Thanks for reading.


	5. The Anomaly

**Chapter 5 The Anomaly**

**Friday, 17.00pm, Kelly's Private Office, St. Agatha's Clinic**

"Is Mr Morris quite ready?" Kelly asks her secretary over the phone and she can almost see the woman smile, pleased to inform her positively.

"He'll be all yours in two days after the necessary check-up with Dr. Tancredi"

"I assume the paperwork has been done?" Kelly _has _to check, even if she knows it was, they have been waiting for this for so long, and suddenly, it's there, and she's nervous. And it's also Friday. There are candles on top of her drawers, waiting to be put on table, and food will be delivered shortly, just before 8pm. There are freshly plucked flowers too, white, orange and yellow, courtesy of Mr Sucre. She will not tell Paul but she made the arrangement herself.

"I personally checked that all forms are in order, Ms Davis... Hey! What do you THINK you are doing?"

"Susan?" Kelly asks but the connection is broken. Before she knows it. Paul is in her office, where she should not have let him enter according to Roger (Ralph, Ralph, Ralph, Roger is only a name) with the former addict, Mahone. Now, _that_ is something she didn't expect.

"And here I was about to start making a romantic dinner," she comments, all business about the new situation.

"Higher orders," Paul says even more business like than she can manage, "the agent here has all the necessary signatures to search your clinic, your office and all your licenses to perform your job. It's useless to check his credentials out, so save yourself some time."

"Please, come in," Kelly tells them both, amused, as if they haven't already barged in her holy of holies. In St. Agatha's at least. There are other places they don't know about. Places she considered showing to Paul before she shot him in his head and they parted ways. _At least I don't have to worry about getting all weak towards Paul and murdered as a next step, _she thinks._ And it's a wonderful way to get rid of Friday, and of Paul. Has he truly changed his ways to bring a law enforcement agent with him? Former criminal or not? _Kelly hopes this could be the case but she is not quite able to believe it. "May I pour you a drink while he is working?" she asks her ex and pours him a whiskey, straight, without waiting for an answer. She pours sparkling water to Mahone and gestures to her private medical cabinet. "Unless you would want a treat from my private supply. They come in pink or yellow coating, as you wish and the effect is quite similar to what you'd been using..." Mahone's face tells her everything she didn't dare to ask, as he drinks the water in one sip to hide his embarrassment, and she immediately serves him another one, in a motherly fashion despite that she is younger than both her guests. She is of the same age with Michael, she thinks. _It's irrelevant, _she dismisses the entire range of thoughts.

"Maybe I should get all the necessary authorisations and do a thorough check up on both of you," she tells them as her office is devastated and the pillows on her expensive designer made bright red sofa cut open. "Jesus knows what I could find."

"It's even worse when you speak of Jesus than when I do," Paul tells her, cold judgement in his eyes, and she has to turn her head away because he is probably right. Except that she refuses to believe in that. _We have to believe we are good to continue to exist, don't we, _she thinks and tries to forget about Paul, about Mahone, about what Roger would say, and about Fridays. She thinks of her daughter and of Esperança and how soon she will go home and have cereals for dinner, like a 13 years old. They will taste better, and safer, than either whiskey or sex.

Three glasses of whisky and several bottles of water later Kelly is desperate. Thai food is delivered and the two men eat it with plastic forks, while she's only looking at them with contempt. Candles are never lit. _Not Korean food, luckily, _she thinks, as the sarcasm gets the better of her. She never much likes the ease with which she can use it, but it has helped her in the past. It will help her again. Because her evening is taking too long and her daughter will be in bed by the time she is able to creep into her own. Paul looks at her with glassy eyes as if he had lost all stomach he had ever had for liquor. Or maybe it's something else. She's fed up and she'll have no more of their game.

"So, agent Mahone?" she asks in her coldest voice that worked well before in the semi-legal interrogations of caught enemy agents. "Are you quite done or do I have to call security to escort you to the door? My patience is at the end, no matter if you've been hired by the presidential candidate Kellerman or Jesus Christ the Saviour in person." She purposefully speaks of God again and hopes He will forgive her for mentioning his name in vain. She was already forgiven so much.

"She's clean," Mahone tells to Paul, disappointed, incredulous and completely confused. Kelly wonders what did Paul exactly tell him about her and the nature of their previous association. _Nothing nice_, she presumes as the agent continues the briefing: "I mean clean all over, licensed, no illicit activity in the past 10 years. She can have a rehab for rich people who pretend to be ill in this place, or perform highly experimental brain surgeries if she wishes to. Which medical activity she chooses is entirely up to her, and she has all the necessary authorizations. This room frightens me by how safe and clean it is, but she is entitled to extreme security measures in her private office if she so wishes and if she can pay for them, which apparently she can. Her previous file from when she worked for the government is inaccessible with my rather high level of security clearance."

"Like mine," Paul says.

"Like yours," Kelly agrees and pours herself whiskey number five to celebrate, decided to fast for the next four days consecutively, in order to be mentally fit for Mr Morris' surgery. That is the thing that _can't _go wrong for more reasons than she can count. "If you don't mind, gentlemen, I'm getting older and I'd like to call it a day."

She accompanies them to the door and picks up her personal belongings nervously among the mayhem in her office. The secretary is long gone so she has to call a taxi. Everyone is gone except for the night crew of the clinic and the patients. It would not do to drive in her condition. Before the taxi appears on a car drive in front of _her _clinic, (no matter what, she is rather proud of St Agatha as her clinic), she removes the secret door in the floor of her office and presses the button which is going to jam the air conditioning the next morning when she will not be there. All personnel will remain blocked in their offices, rooms and cells, and nearly suffocate before the fire brigade comes from Helena and breaks in. Ralph's orders. She has to obey them like a good soldier.

She hopes to God Ralph is right about this too, and that it will help Michael Scofield do what they need him to do, rather than to just cause heart attacks and more accidental deaths than she would like to have mentioned in her CV for the future.

Adelaide will sleep when she comes home, more is a pity. Not to see your daughter grow as much as you would wish to.

When the taxi turns around to leave the clinic, she sees them both in the car parked deep in the forest, Paul _and _Mahone. She hums with resignation realizing that they will follow her home to nose around her block for anything suspicious; she leans in the back of the car seat and gives in to the overwhelming exhaustion, whistling a sad tune she learned in Africa. To hide a disappointment that Paul didn't wait for her on his own, apparently still too afraid of her to try anything he might like. She regrets it still, as her eyes and her body decide to shut down.

Kelly Davis drifts to sleep.

xxxxxxxx

**Michael's room, St Agatha, Saturday, 10 am**

It starts getting hot while he (Michael, he has to remind himself not to forget his name every single day), while Michael is having breakfast, using his fingers on eggs and bacon, only because he can. Just like he occasionally still wiggles his toes after waking up, to confirm that he's alive. The window of his room closes, the door clicks (un)safely in place. There are no keys in St Agatha; there are cards for staff, and automated locking mechanisms in case of anomalies.

The sun is thus locked out of his window, yet it becomes unbearably hot inside. He doesn't know how he knows it but he does know it's all _wrong. _Contemporary well-designed and well constructed buildings such as the one where he is locked up do not behave that way in any other circumstances.

Michael still finishes his breakfast, especially his coffee and his orange juice. The importance of staying hydrated appearing in his mind like so many other things he doesn't understand. Increasingly worried, he takes a spoon and approaches the window, easier to breach. In twenty minutes he lets in a bit of hot air from the outside through that window, a current of stale air which is still way more natural than what is inside. One sweating hour later, the spoon is under the door, creating just enough room to fool the blocking mechanism. Several knife clicks away and the door creaks open. All people in the clinic seem to be locked in their respective cubicles, except that his little manoeuvre unblocked the path to the viewing room. The place with a large screen from which he is being monitored despite that on his side, from his room, it looks like just another dull wall. He often wonders if the other three walls lead to similar observation points, each looking at a different set of parameters.

Two men in white coats lay asleep at their working posts from the lack of air. He hastily cracks one of the windows open with cutlery, to make it safer, but not before he views all the screens, clicking with the mouse to reveal as much of the complex he is being held in as possible, before being in a danger to faint too, from the lack of oxygen, and extreme heat.

The information is abundant and Michael grabs a pen from the desks in front of him and draws the map of the facilities obsessively on his arms, his thighs, his abdomen, before recovering the freshly painted skin in a hurry, as a child stealing sweets from the closet before the parents come home. He thinks he may have another fifteen minutes before his guardians are awake and see he is missing, not enough time to find the exit and run. His sketches reveal he is too deep in the complex for that.

Another thing immediately attracts his attention.

Sara wears an orange top, _not yellow_, he regrets, but the one she's wearing will do just fine for him. What puts him on edge is that she is laying on the floor of her office, next to her desk, the place he has never been, but it is somewhere behind the windowless room he was taken to be examined by her.

He double checks the screens, happy that the men are not waking up yet.

He's got ten minutes, he knows now. He uses the mouse again, tries to remember the way he was taken there, knows they have been walking him around on purpose. Remembers anyway. He realises there is a wall of reinforced metal between the wing he is in and the wing where she's asleep. He tries to lift a panel on the ceiling, but there is no passage for ventilation as it should be. _New building_, he thinks, _in a place where it can get really cold in winter._

He tries the floor. There is no visible opening but he can lift a slab after a bit of probing, and there, there is floor heating installed and there is also a passage, not very high, but he can crawl through it in... 5 minutes, hopefully, 5 to go there, and 5 to get back. He's not that far. He has his hat on since he left the room, he doesn't know why. Probably because if Kelly is right and if he's some sort of a criminal people have seen on television, his face and voice won't comfort anyone. On the contrary. He doesn't know what he wants from Sara, but to frighten her is not that. His newly discovered skills with cutlery scare him to begin with. He wonders if he had a gun, if he would know how to fire it. He hopes that he wouldn't but he is not certain.

So he crawls under the floors, and makes one wrong turn, but he is rewarded in the end. He can pass to her wing, and he knows that this passage only exists because the building is so new that some details have not been finished yet. He has no idea about Kelly's schedule of works needed to complete the process, but soon, very soon even, the passage he is in will be closed, except on a few points where space is necessary for maintenance.

Six minutes. He will probably never make it back on time but he has made it to her room. Breakfast knife still in his hands, he opens the windows, carries her, almost drags her to one of them. Sara stirs in his arms saying hmmmm, and it's familiar. He opens the first too buttons on her pale orange top, a silky sleeveless thing. And he wishes he can stay. He can't. Irrationally, he lifts the stupid hat for bees he's wearing just enough to place a small kiss on her neck, just above her shoulder. She stirs further, and her arms grasp his shoulders. He has to leave her half laying on a wide window sill, next to the source of air, not fresh, but air nonetheless.

Before he goes, he sees the paper bird on her desk. Heart swollen with equal parts joy and grief, he moves it an inch to the right.

He is back to his wing by the time the alarm goes on, and the sirens of the fire brigade can be heard in the distance. The two people tasked with viewing him that morning are waking up slowly, rubbing their eyes, but they are too dizzy to notice that the guinea pig they had been watching is passing behind them, straw hat over his face. He closes his window and his door again, and they are immediately unblocked by the safety system that time. By the time his gaolers finish winking, he lies on the floor of his room, pretending to wake up, and he wipes a patch of salty liquid from his eyes.

_I'm crying, _he concludes, not knowing why.

Xxxxx

Sara wakes up at the window where she didn't fall asleep, and finds the top she wears unbuttoned. She opens her eyes with difficulty and sticks her head through the window. Breathes in and breathes out as the midday sun burns her nose, and she worries for a second if she'll get freckles. The yard is full of firemen and ambulances, people are carried out on stretchers, victims are fighting for air.

She understands something went wrong and the building locked up by mistake. She doesn't understand why her windows are open while the firemen are still fighting to open the rest. A man wearing the sign of red cross ventures in, asks if she is all right.

"Yes," she says. But she isn't. Maybe coming to Montana was not the best idea. She goes back to the window and feels crazy. She looks at her top in the window glass. Runs to the looking glass to check her findings. They are there.

Fingerprints, traces of fat. Under her shoulders and nearing her breasts. Someone with dirty hands picked her up _like that, like that, like that. _Like Michael did when he caught her in Fox River when she jumped down from the path they took together through the ceilings when there was a riot in the prison, and he came to save her.

There is no Michael now, but someone has still been there and made sure she was all right. She doesn't know yet the odds of not being fine after the incident. She will calculate that equation later when she sees the statistics about quality and quantity of injuries. She feels cared for, safe, when Kelly Davis bursts in and asks if everything is okay.

She nods, "okay," she says, unsure why her boss is so much worried about her safety all of a sudden. It's abnormal even if it flatters her ego. She sees the paper bird again, the one she didn't throw away by accident, she lies to herself. The bird has been moved an inch from where it stands, at her screen. Moved, a sign. Moved, a signature.

_Michael, _she sighs, inwardly, and she thinks she will cry. She tells herself she's a physician first of all. Maybe the rich origami lover on vacation in St Agatha needs help. Maybe he's lonely and likes adventure. Still an image of a straw hat running on all fours through the ceilings to help her makes her laugh, loudly. She stands on the chair and tries to see if there's is any space up there, but there isn't. And the door has been locked before the fireman opened it.

That's strange. Unless her saviour was a ghost and walked through the walls, she had no idea how he reached her in her room and went away equally fast.

Also something only Michael would be capable of.

But Michael is not there.

xxxxx

**Ralph's room, ward for incurable patients, St Agatha**

"Was that your plan all along, Roger?" Kelly asks him after switching off the local surveillance circuit using her personal card and code. They don't need recordings now and she is entitled to do that. There is this thing called the doctor-patient confidence. Her supervision team within the state authorities will not doubt her because of that. "She could have died the way her office is positioned."

"She is expendable," Roger says.

"I agree," Kelly replies immediately, "but we may have need of her if your first little plan doesn't work."

"Sorry for not being sentimental like you are, Kelly," Roger says, "but I had to see if your Michael was as smart as you say, before I try my own luck with him. Now I am more convinced that he can do what I need him to do."

"Thank you so much for trusting me, Roger," Kelly says and stops regretting what could have happened to Sara. She has just learned another thing, and she hopes that Ralph didn't notice. Ralph thinks of Kelly as if she is also expendable. But Kelly doesn't, and she will do all in her powers, and that's a lot, to end up their joint venture on equal footing. Ralph can be thankful that she is reasonably fair in doing business, she will not try to take all the benefits for herself, leaving Ralph good and dead after they are done. She will let him keep his miserable life. But she will not let _him_ handle the plans for the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, that people would pay millions to possess. Those valuables she intends to trade herself as she sees fit. Once she finds out where Ralph has them stored in the first place.

"Is Mr Morris ready?" Roger asks laying on his bed, gazing at the garden from his ground floor window.

"Almost, Kelly says, following his gaze, "if your little stunt didn't cause a legitimate need for a few days of sick leave to our only general physician, we could have proceeded before Bagwell arrives."

"Best wait for Bagwell," Roger says.

"Another test of yours?" she hisses, very pissed off.

"Let's just say, the more, the merrier. Look!

She does, and in the bottom of the garden there is Michael who is pretending to be gardening next to Sucre, camouflaged in his new attire that protects his head against the sun. Michael doesn't recognize his former cellmate, just like he didn't recognise his own wife. _But he saved her nevertheless, _Kelly thinks, glad the she was right about his abilities and his intelligence, to a certain point. She doesn't know yet for sure if she was right all the way.

"Well," she tells Ralph to distract him from the two men, "at least what you did proves my basic theory. When he is put in a similar situation, it will trigger the same responses. Once he saved his wife-to-be in a potentially life threatening situation in Fox River. We just have to make him believe you destiny is similar to Lincoln's and you will be out before September."

Ralph only thinks about himself at that moment, about his hopes to finally break out of the state custody after ten long years, and it is in that moment that Kelly sees Michael stealing a shovel from Sucre, one in a set of many her new employee brought out to work. She is relieved that Sucre is as clumsy as a gardener as when he was trying to be a thief, and ended up as an convict. Michael is soon gone with the shovel, and Kelly knows that the attendants won't find it in his room.

Ralph hasn't seen a thing.

Michael will now probably start digging, somewhere, and it will allow Kelly to make a test of her own.

In full consciousness that she is a dead woman if anything goes wrong.

"Roger," she tells her patient and her prisoner just before switching the surveillance system back on. (If she doesn't, it will go back on automatically after a certain time, the building is too smart to fool. For most people, that is.) "It's the last time I am pressing switches for you without knowing more of your plans and their consequences. Next time feel free to find your way through the sewers to my office, if you want to do any more tests."

"I've always loved your humour, Kelly," Roger says and touches her face, removes a black sharp hair from her ice blue eyes. "I would make you feel much better than Paul ever did."

"It's intriguing," she says, licking her lips, which have turned too dry from a maniacal ride back to St Agatha's, still not fully recovered from the night before. "But the policy of St Agatha says I will not mess up with patients. Once this is over, you'd be welcome to try your luck in my pants."

With that, she switches the surveillance on, pressing a switch for Roger, after all.

xxxxxx

Before Sara goes home in the late afternoon, after a day spent drinking water and recovering, she is obliged to halt next to _that_ place in the wall. She breathes towards the imperceptible hole, and she blows two words in the direction of the inside. "Thank you," she whispers. She knows there is no one on the other side, listening, only a product of her fantasies.

But it feels good to be thanking someone again. Even if he is not real.

She makes two steps to leave, turns her head around and smiles to the wall, as if it was a fence in Fox River behind which Michael would watch her. One skilled hand on the wires, one sweaty grey T-shirt over his compact shoulders.

She smiles fully, like a flower spreading its petals to the sun, before she finds the composure to walk away. (She doesn't think of Mikey ever since she woke up at the window of her office until that moment, which is more than she can usually exist without thinking of her son.)

Montana may be good after all. She doesn't know where it will take her in the end, but she feels a bit more alive with every single day.

xxx

**A/N** Huge thank you to the guests who reviewed. This story really depends on your opinion that it is worth continuing, as I am sometimes unsure about it myself.


	6. The Surgery

**Chapter 6 The Surgery**

**St. Agatha's, Theodore Bagwell's room**

T-Bag's new room is large and has a garden view. (He refuses to call it _cell,_ such a vulgar name, not worthy of his new _accommodation _in this fine clinic.) He has a roommate (not a _cellmate_) who is most likely another inmate with mental troubles like Theodore. But he at least seems like he was an honest successful businessman, cordial, college educated and entrepreneurial by nature, a dream of every American man and woman. They share a civil conversation about the role of _innovation _and _new technologies _in modern day industry and T-Bag actually enjoys it, only slightly regretting that he is not attracted to the man. So he will have to look elsewhere for a partner to alleviate _that _part of his inner tensions. If he doesn't find anyone, he will just get less picky and go for his cellie. (_Roommate, _he corrects only one part of his dirty thoughts.) He has no clue about the subjects they are discussing, but his roommate calls Theodore's ideas "fresh", looking at him as if he truly means it.

_There have to be other guests in this place, _he thinks enjoying the view and an excellent meal he was served, incomparably better than in Fox River. Chicken _soufflé. _T-Bag smirks at his face in a mirror facing one of the beds. _We only miss a small glass of some liquor, _he daydreams, sprawled languidly on his comfortable bed.

At 18.00 sharp an attendant shows up bringing two glasses of finest French cognac on a plate. T-Bag has never had anything like that in his life, not even close, including when he posed as a business genius in a company.

"Cheers," says Mr John T. Morris, his roommate, and T-Bag cannot help but smile, not believing his luck.

St Agatha's is a paradise on earth. And he's lucky to be in it.

**Sara's Office, St Agatha**

She is looking at the blood work of Mr Morris and she doesn't understand. The results are good and Mr Morris seems to be in a good physical health. Yet the extension of medical evaluation required from her on a job slip she got by email from Kelly is way too great for a standard follow-up of rich individuals spending the time of their leisure in St Agatha.

It bothers her, so she logs in her computer and checks which room Mr Morris is in. It turns out he is well registered as a _patient _in the hospital, on an inpatient, not outpatient treatment, yet the room he is attributed by the initial check-in system does not exist in St Agatha. Unless there are parts of the clinic she is now supposed to know existed. Or there is something she doesn't quite get with her computer. She thinks she should ask Kelly. She thinks of it better and decides to keep it quiet and to do first a little investigation on her own.

Mr John T. Morris is a friendly man, and unlike the patients she has seen so far, he doesn't seem to be suffering from any kind of psychological trouble. He is plain, self-assured, and more straightforward than her late father. So she tries asking: "Any particular reason you requested all these tests to be performed?"

"No, Madam," he says, "I have no idea what they all entail. I trust the personnel in this clinic to order what is best. This establishment has high recommendations."

"Well, in that case you will be happy to know that all the preliminary results are in and you are fine on all counts."

"Great," the man is truly pleased. "I'm looking forward to the next step," he says with something like folly in his eyes, or maybe foolish hope. She doesn't like his expression.

Sara wonders what the next step could be but she can't think fast enough of another non obvious manner to fish out more information from Mr Morris. When he leaves, she compares the extent of the check-up performed with nearly everything she learned in medical school.

_A preparation for a surgery, no doubt, _she concludes. _An extensive, long lasting one._ The only thing missing on her job slip is the opinion of the anaesthesiologist. She is not one and St. Agatha does not have one. Or should not have one as far as she knows. She checks the credentials of all employed paramedical personnel and care takers in the clinic she knows. No one. She checks further into the CVs of the kitchen and the security personnel. Among security files, she sees red. Mr Mark Riley, night guard, holds a degree of a known UK school in anaesthesiology. Further digging shows his name is missing from the rotating schedule of the guards of one main and two side entrances to St Agatha that she is aware of. So either there is another entrance she doesn't know about, or Mr Riley does not work as a guard at all.

She doesn't know which possibility scares her more.

Until there is a third one, even more dreadful. When she comes home that evening, (forcing herself not to stop at _that_ part of the wall as she did every day until the anomaly), Mikey is not alone. (The two days of sick leave she spent at home after the accident were enough to convince herself that she was getting crazy and that she had to stop looking for hints and signs where there were none. She cannot be caught talking to a wall. Only the origami crane still lives at her desk. She has no heart left to throw it away.)

Lincoln and Kellerman are seated on her couch, watching a football match on _her _TV, and her son makes gestures of desperation.

"They have just arrived, mom," he says. "I know you love uncle Lincoln, but I have no idea who this one is."

That one shows a black eye. Sara looks at her son inquisitively.

"Oh, that," Mikey says. "Adelaide was here. Her mom, Mrs Esperança, got it all wrong, she thought Mr-"

"-Kellerman," Paul fills in the name.

"She thought that Mr Kellerman wanted to kidnap Adelaide. Like the bad men in the cartoon do."

"It was a misunderstanding," Kellerman says.

Sara nods and tells her son: "You were a good boy, Mikey. But now it's time to sleep."

"May I still play with uncle Lincoln?" Mikey doesn't agree.

"Tomorrow," Linclon helps, luckily. "Listen to your mother. She knows best. I can put you to bed if she allows."

Sara nods again but as she does that her hand is in the drawer under the bar. When Lincoln and Mikey are out of the room, she turns back and she is pointing a gun at Paul. Just in case. He may have witnessed in her favour, in Lincoln's favour, but he is still the guy who would have drowned her in the hotel room sink, and she doesn't quite trust him.

"How is life?" she asks, carelessly.

"Never better," Paul grins and cleans his throat. "Came here to pay a visit to an old _business_ friend of mine." He stresses the word business in a most sinister way, and Sara begins to worry.

"How nice," she says, "how is he? Not much business for people like you in a place like Helena, I guess, now that Terrence Steadman is dead."

"_She_ is doing fine, this friend of mine," Kellerman says ignoring her insinuations. "Her name is Kelly. Kelly Davis."

The gun in her hand nearly trembles but she grips it harder, stilling it with the sheer force of her mind.

"Oh yeah?" she fakes not being impressed. "I didn't realize you used to work as a shrink."

"Kelly is no shrink," he informs her. "She's a surgeon by education. It should be pretty easy for another doctor like you to check that. Her school and all that stuff. And she's a damn good surgeon, some people would say, except that she has never worked in a conventional medical institution until now, if you understand what I mean."

"I am not quite sure that I do," Sara says coldly, but she's afraid she knows exactly what Paul means.

"Think of what a surgeon can do in a line of work I was taking for Caroline Reynolds," Paul says sweetly. "There are more, and more cruel ways to protect one's charge and eliminate threats than what I have been trained in, or good at."

"I see," Sara says and sighs with relief because Lincoln is already back. Mikey falls asleep faster with his uncle than with her. Which only makes her wonder what miracles a father's presence could do with him. "I heard him, Lincoln," she tells her brother in law understanding why he is paying her a visit. "I heard him and I don't believe any of it. I haven't seen a sign of anything unusual in St Agatha."

Except that she did. A week ago she nearly died and today she did a check up on a man whose room didn't exist, for a procedure not performed in an exclusive resort for medical tourism and relaxation of body and mind she _thinks _she is working in. They only miss yoga lessons on the public side of the offer and she thinks that they might come.

"We'll hang around the city for a few days," Lincoln says, "then go and see the native American way of living higher up north and that. It's almost time for summer holidays, maybe LJ can visit us as well when his school is finished."

"And I am on a break in my campaign for health reasons," Paul informs her and she hates them both for being there, and for probably being right. Lincoln is not too fond of Paul either, the presence of Michael's brother in her living a silent witness that Kellerman may have a point in warning her.

"You'd better be out of here in a week," she tells them, "I will let you use my microwave for that long and then it's over! I'll call the police to kick you out if necessary."

She knows that they will not listen, but at least she has to try.

xxxxxxxxxxx

**Garden of St Agatha**

"So how do you like it here?" the boss asks him, and Sucre doesn't know what to say. Yes, one of his shovels is missing, and it shouldn't be. But that is not reason enough for the administration of the clinic to spy on an honest man, or for the Chief Executive Officer to pay him a visit. She is good looking, black short hair getting in her eyes, cold blue eyes which sometimes show signs of fire as if they were dark brown or black, as truly beautiful _passionate_ eyes have to be. _Maybe she came to enjoy the sun,_ Sucre tells himself working on a patch of blue hydrangeas where the thick growth of the blossoming plants needs to be somewhat lessened to leave more room for flowering. Kelly is seated on a bench behind him, nose stuck towards the sun, her skin slightly yellow, so she is probably not afraid of getting burned. Even if a patch of skin under her shirt is much paler, revealing its natural colour. _Plenty of sitting in the sun or those horrible lotions women use to get sun tanned_, Sucre thinks in dismay about Kelly's face. When he sees such unnatural thing he misses Maricruz and her naturally beautiful skin even more. He's been in St Agatha for a bit more than a week, avoiding Sara, which is not difficult because he is employed in a part of the clinic not registered to exist, and other than that he hasn't noticed a singular thing which is out of order. _Yet, _he tells himself.

"Have you noticed him before?" Kelly asks then, pointing at another man dressed like a gardener, except that a big straw hat surrounded by a kind of veil made of some kind of gauze hides his face. Sucre shakes his head to say _"no" and_ continues to work around the flowers.

"Look, then," she insists. "He's our new patient, he arrived shortly before you were employed, Mr Sucre. You were even gardening together before he was confined to his own quarters due to his condition."

"I understand," he says even if he doesn't. Ms Davies' eyes flash with _that _fire which either amazes him, or makes him feel really uneasy about the state of things in St Agatha. "Do you? I wonder..." she says, teasing him, removing a strand of pointy black hair from her eyes.

"He is recovering from a difficult and possibly life threatening brain surgery," she states, serious as if she was on her mother's funeral.

"Brain surgery," he repeats, and maybe, maybe he is beginning to understand.

"After such surgeries," Kelly explains to Sucre as if he was a high school student. And not a very gifted one as that. Even when he was at high school, Fernando was never any good in those science things. "After such surgeries, men can sometimes forget who they are, and it takes a terrible lot of time for them to recover, _if _they recover properly at all.

The second gardener sits in the grass and seems to be observing its growth, immobile like a plant. He sits in a completely enclosed part of the garden where not even Sucre is allowed. Only a few man are occasionally pacing up and down in it, Fernando noticed, and always only one at the time, in regular periods of time. "And they should stay out of the sun," Sucre completes Kelly's thought.

"Yes," she confirms. "Well, I am glad that you don't see him as anything special," she says and she leaves. That more than anything spurs Sucre's desire to take a good look at the man under the gauze. Miss Davis was very tense and on the edge of _something _ all the time during their conversation and Sucre wonders what it was. She was staring at her hands as if they were dirty, or covered in innocent blood, occasionally flexing her fingers and her wrists. Sucre still finishes his work with the flowers, in case he is being watched, before walking lazily to the fence of the second part of the garden where the man with the hat watches the grass growing and the world turn.

Sucre observes him in silence for the entire two minutes before he loses patience. "Hey, you!" he calls the man. "It's such good weather today, isn't it?.

"Yeah," the young voice says, "I was wondering what is under this grass."

The voice is oddly familiar and Sucre needs to hear more. "Ground!" he yelps. "What else would there be?"

"Wires," the other man says, "circuits, short circuits, death."

"Not good for flowers," Sucre said.

"Not good at all," the other man said and turns around so that Fernando can now see him from the front. He still doesn't see his face but his guts tell him it can't be anyone else.

"Ave Maria Santísima," he murmurs, making the sign of a cross. He kisses a cross he is wearing on a thin chain around his neck. "Papi…"

Behind the bars, again, it is his best friend who has come back from the dead.

Michael Scofield is alive.

"Not papi," Michael says in a friendly voice, as if his presence here is not shocking, as if he doesn't own them all an explanation. "They tell me my name is Michael."

"Isn't it, papi?" Fernando asks, expecting a story of _what _has happened. He has a right to an explanation, he thinks, him, and Sara and Lincoln… He will give him a minute before he presses him for answers.

"I don't know," Michael says honestly, "it might be. You won't believe me, why should you, but it's just that I don't remember."

There is no lie in his voice or stature, and it is so obvious all of a sudden. Fernando can't figure how he could have ever thought differently. Michael Scofield wouldn't let any of them live through his death if he knew about it. He always cared for other people more than he cared for himself, and perhaps in his new life, it's time for that to stop. If possible at all.

"Papi…" Sucre says again, tearing at his short hairstyle with both hands. He swallows and tries to say something nice until he can think about what he should do. "Michael is a good name. He is an archangel who defeats the devil."

"I see," Michael says, "I didn't know that. So then it's not such a bad name after all."

_Not at all, _Sucre thinks, but he doesn't say anything else. His first impulse is to run to Sara who has no idea even that Sucre is there, working in the same place where she does, only on the other side of the walled precinct. But he thinks better of it. A little more time will not harm anyone after five years. He will keep quiet about it until Michael gets better and becomes himself, or at least until he can learn a bit more about what is going on. Because if Michael is alive, there might be some really evil people all around them. And he, Sucre, has to be really careful if he doesn't want anyone to be hurt and become as dead as Michael Scofield was supposed to be.

xxxxxxxxx

**St. Agatha's, Theodore Bagwell's room, one day later, around noon**

T-Bag remembered how Mr Morris went to take some air after breakfast on his two feet. Yet he has returned to his room on his back, immobile. He was brought in on a hospital bed with four or five attendants fussing around him, bringing some machines to hook him on them for life support. T-Bag could only stare and listen when they worked".

"He seemed so strong," one attendant complains.

"He was," another one, a female, says and T-Bag licks his lips because she is not _bad _at all. Dark-haired and tiny. Reminds him a bit of the director of this prison whom he had seen once for five minutes when he arrived. _Kelly... _He would fuck her against the first wall if he only had a chance. He didn't have it so far. But maybe he will still get one. _Good old T-Bag doesn 't give up that easily, _the familiar knowledge makes him happy, and almost giddy from excitement.

"They rarely make it past the surgery," the third one says.

"At least he made that," the female says again.

"Little luck in that," says the fourth one, the fat man who hasn't spoken yet. "He will be attached to the machines until they switch them off, just like all others before him."

Mr Morris is left in his bed, plenty of wires, infusions and tubes around him, or stemming from his body. One half of a leisure room for two looks all of the sudden like a full fledged hospital, and the cognac from the day before gets a bitter taste in T-Bag's mouth.

"This procedure Mr Morris has undergone," he asks the attendants innocently, presenting his best face and getting out his best use of language, "is it habitual?"

"Mr Bagwell," the female tells him, "all patients in this wing are supposed to undergo the procedure. You have signed an authorisation yourself before arrival."

T-Bag doesn't want to fuck the woman anymore, he wants to squash her skull or break it open with a piece of the high-tech medical equipment from the bloody room, but there are four other attendants inside and he wouldn't get very far. The food he receives that day is still better than in Fox River but it's not extraordinary. There is no liquor served at 6 o'clock.

He remembers signing a folder of documents in Fox River before he was transferred to St Agatha, without reading any of them, obviously. All he saw was a picture of a sunny garden, comfortable rooms and professional attendants. He wants to scream and hit the wall with his head, now that he learned the price of it. He nearly breaks the mirror with his fists, but he gives up on doing that at the last possible moment before irreparable damage is done to the precious looking glass. _Artistic frame, _T-Bag thinks, admiring the mirror.

Probably he got into that entire mess because of his greediness to enjoy what little life has to offer to a mentally handicapped man like himself. St Agatha needs to have really convincing scientific title, something like, studying the brains of the demented people to develop cures and prevent re-occurrence of disease in general population. He cannot think of an adequate name, but there surely as hell is one. But even if it is not called that way, in reality, St Agatha is not a resort, and his room is not a room but a cell. The food and the cognac were the last wishes of a man dying, and T-Bag finally understands. _He is a prisoner in a death row._

He has to break out of there.

The sooner, the better.

xxxxxxxxx

**Michaels's room, St Agatha, some time deep at night after Mr Morris surgery**

She didn't approach the wall, his wall, their wall, for almost a week.

The sensation hurts. He has no right to her, and she has no idea he had saved her. Even he himself has no idea what he saved her from. But it still pains him and he would wish her to halt, whisper something like she did on that day, anything, to a hole that started meaning his whole life, or just stop at a short distance from it, turn around and smile.

When she did that, he leaned one of his arms high up on the wall, pressed his forehead to the cold stony surface, and just stared through the minuscule opening until the approaching steps from the inside the building called him to order, and he had to withdraw. It wouldn't do for any of the attendants to see what he was doing.

He didn't see Roger, or Kelly for a week either. He doesn't know this man, Roger. Yet he seems friendly and fatherly at the same time. _Like… Like an older brother! That's it,_ Michael thinks, _that's it. He could be my older brother if I had one. _He wonders if he has one. Or a younger brother. Or a sister. He would ask Kelly such things but she hasn't shown up either. _The man, Roger, he was afraid_, Michael remembers, and decides to ask more about it if he ever sees him again. By now he is so lonely with his doubts and lack of knowledge about anything that he could talk to his own image in a pool of water, just to forget about his condition.

The first good thing that happens is the gardener. He is not like Roger. He inspires a different kind of confidence, and tells him something nice about his name. _St Michael, the archangel_. It's preposterous, but at least it is positive. He regrets not asking the gardener what his name was. Maybe next day. The shovel is hidden in a shallow grave, more scraped out than dug, in front of the wall through which he has seen Sara, through which he had been on the lookout for Sara every single day since she smiled at him.

He soon found he couldn't dig much deeper than the shallow hole he made at the very beginning of his garden breaks when he was most certain none of the attendants was watching. There was some kind of security system within the ground, very modern, and very difficult to fool.

_Why should I dig?_ He still doesn't know. There's no one on the outside waiting for him as far a he had been told and even if he asks Kelly about his real family he doesn't believe that she would tell him the truth.

He cannot catch sleep, cannot catch sleep. From the open window a few floors below, he hears an inhuman cry of a man screaming with despair, as if he was being cut open alive. He shivers. The commotion is soon over but he finds it damn difficult to forget that sound and all the questions about what it meant. He looks out at the night sky and focuses on the moon, almost full but not quite.

The shadows of grey look different on the walls of his room in moonlight, between marvelous and threatening.

_What are they doing to people down here? _he wonders. _What will they do to me?_

His determination to talk to Roger, and Kelly, grows.

But when he finally manages to fall asleep in his hospital bed, after he had examined all the irregularities in the window frame and glass for the hundredth time (because that is how his brain works, and he cannot stop it from working), after he did all that, the mind finally relaxes, and he only sees the woman who wouldn't come to the wall anymore to see him.

Maybe she is the reason he should dig. Get out and tell her he's in love with her. _What a pick up line it would be_, he thinks. _Hello, Sara_, he'd say, _I have no idea who I am but I know I'm in love with you._

If he frightens her, he can always go back.

xxxxxxx

Thank you to all who reviewed. This story is very feedback dependent. Please be so kind to tell me if it is still ok to read.


	7. The Dress

**Chapter 7 The Dress**

**In front of St Agatha**

Years later, she will still never know why she wore that dress on that particular day.

It _is _the hottest day since she came to Montana, and the temperature in the sun is suffocating. She thought summer in Helena would be colder than in Chicago. But the only freshness to be found is during the late hours of the night; in the amazingly warm summer nights, even within the city. She has never spent the night in the clinic but she imagines that in St Agatha, situated high up and above the civilization, in the green, it has to be even better.

She still hates dresses. It's just not her style. Jeans and T-shirt are good enough for her, and her figure is such that she doesn't have to change her habits when getting older. She wore a dress on her wedding day, and she wears one on every anniversary of Michael's death. (Because it reminds her vividly enough of how he looked at her on their wedding day, and she never wants to forget that look). That about sums it up.

So the heat is not a reason good enough why she is now wearing a black casual knee-length dress, widening only so slightly at the bottom to provide some breeze to sweaty thighs when walking. Her shoulders are covered only by two very thin black straps crossing over her bare back. It's a summer dress, soft and simple. And, yes, the day is way too warm, but if she wanted to be completely casual she could have picked up something in lighter color, or with an innocent looking pattern.

That day she doesn't care about innocence and that day she stops, daringly, at that spot on the outside wall of the clinic where the unknown man should be. Where he should wait for her still after a week of ignoring him. If anyone, anyone, this unknown man, or anyone else, is _ever_ going to start taking Michael's place in her life, he should better be like him in more things than a mere predilection for origami and mind games.

She will never understand either why she was wearing her hair down on that day.

Normally, she would tie it up, in summer even more so.

She tells herself she does it because it is the only way to feel foolish enough to forget Kellerman is sleeping on her couch, her boss may be a mass murderer under the cover of a medical degree, and there are dangerous possibly _illicit _surgeries going on in a peaceful clinic she was supposed to work for.

That is what she tells herself, knowing in the back of her mind it is not the whole truth.

Sara stands at the wall, briefly, with hesitation. She is two hours early for her work, so probably the patients are not even out yet, those she sees on a daily basis, and those that are hidden elsewhere. He cannot be waiting for her, she knows, yet she expects it of him, as if she was in a position to influence his mind. She makes a mental note of the terrain of the clinic as she believes that it looks, the part that she is shown. The part on the public layout hanging behind the entrance door. The only thing that is supposed to be behind the wall she is now staring at is a private garden, not belonging to the clinic.

But that is probably a lie, and she suspects that Mr Morris could be found on the other side of the wall too, just like the man she is looking for against her better judgement. _God knows in which conditions they are kept, _she shivers at the thought, remembering Fox River. Mr Morris is the first candidate to suffer greatly for all she knows, in the company of God knows how many other patients waiting for their turn, her mystery man only one of them, the real lucrative business of the clinic hidden behind the closed door. She thinks she knows what it is, the only thing that makes sense, the promise to the incurable: a thread of hope, where no hope should be possible, thinner than the straps on her black dress.

She stands there for a minute until she feels utterly stupid and afraid that Kelly, Paul's _associate,_ could sneak behind her back and catch her in the act.

She hurries to her office and starts the computer, eager to check on a condition of a patient, Mr Morris. The white coat hides both her attire, her guilt, and her confusion. She should have said something more to Mr Morris. She's a doctor, she has sworn an oath, and she has to do something.

The computer blinks and beeps, merciless. The results of her search in St Agatha's database show on screen before a milisecond is gone by.

Mr John T. Morris died in the night.

The listed cause of death is _brain haemorrhage_.

She grips the origami crane and stares wildly at the screen.

Hours go by before she can stop herself from shaking.

xxxxxx

**Michael's room, St Agatha**

Michael is awake way before dawn.

Longingly, he looks at the driveway of the clinic from above, from afar, without any expectations to see her. He does it every morning just in case. A routine, a senseless repetition, just like the patterns of paint brush and damage caused by time on his room walls. He knows them by heart from too much consecutive study of his too detailed mind.

And then, then...

Not only that she is there, she is a vision of everything he would want in his life on a daily basis if he could choose. She's walking without stopping, in a simple black dress revealing her shoulders and half of her back. She goes covered with the conspicuous absence of textile and with soft curls falling, glowing faintly orange on the tips in the weak light of the morning.

Then, then, then, she stops _there, _at their place, and her eyes are searching the wall.

_She still remembers me, _he thinks, regretting again that he didn't dare to speak to her the only time when they were both conscious and face to face. Well, _face to mask, _he corrects himself. _Sara, _he calls out to her as the heat is very slowly invading St Agatha. He knows that very soon they will come for him to let him in the garden. And he knows he will find a way to dig his way out around the alert system under the wall. There is one option he didn't try yet in his methodical mind. But for that he believes he should learn a thing or two about Kelly's private taste, to make it work. The data he glimpsed from the computers before he ran to Sara's aid indicated that Ms Davis had a strong personal role in the construction of the building, and that always counted for something. In the experience he knows he possesses but he can't entirely place it in a context, or even remember it correctly.

_First things first_, he tells himself. When the attendants come for him, he is determined to test his new hypothesis before he orchestrates a distraction powerful enough to warrant Kelly's presence. He will need it to obtain the key with which to fool entirely the security that has been put in place. The level of it is impressively high for a hospital, higher than in a prison, almost of a _military quality. _Knowing that makes him terribly afraid of who he is and of what he has done to gather such certainties in the first place. He must be a criminal at best, and a psychotic maniac could be a close second description. He could also work for law enforcement, or army. Both would explain his knowledge at some level, but it just doesn't sit right with him. He was none of that and he knows it.

Michael is out in the sun and his head is starting to boil despite a pile of gauze hiding his face from its glare. The shovel is where he had left it and soon he is half a meter under the ground where the signal and the sensors start. He avoids the first such sensor he finds, and he places the shovel a bit further until the soil is clean again. He probes the softened brown mass further, with great caution, testing the progression of the sensors in one direction several times. Than he changes it a bit, with different results. He is jubilant.

There is a pattern in the placement of the sensors, which would trigger an alarm if he digs further (_or worse, _he knows, _it could electrocute him on the spot, or emit dangerous radiation waves in his direction)_. It's irregular but it is there. He is a bit angry for not seeing it even before. He only has to find the correct key to switch it off, and than he can turn to tresspassing, and see where he is, and what is on the outside, for real.

He is done with his exploration way before the attendants should return. He wants to sit down and wait for that unavoidable conclusion of his morning when a commotion in another part of garden, from which he is fenced off, attracts all of his considerable attention span. The more he listens to it, the more nervous he gets on the inside, just like the four men speaking. Michael sits quietly in the grass, in a small shade projected by the wall, absorbing the information, grateful for the mask that hides his features.

xxxxxxx

**Larger section of the garden of St Agatha's closed ward**

The larger part of the garden is normally empty. But on that day when Michael is eager to be brought in, to provoke Kelly, to verify his assumptions, to break out and see Sara, to ask her why she stopped to see him that day, to ask her why she didn't do it for a week, on such a day, no one is coming for him. _Almost on purpose, _ he thinks and saves the thought for later consideration.

A familiar looking ugly man with a southern accent is annoying two other patients not too far from an observant pair of veiled blue-green eyes. They all wear grey hospital clothing, which could be prison clothing if a logo was only a little bit different. Or at least if it didn't include the miniature image of the saint which gave the clinic its name. The two men being tutored are seated on a bench. One is rather fat and dark-haired, the other thin and very young, barely more than a boy, in his early twenties.

"Are you crazy?" the ugly man asks them, convinced of his own truth, looking every bit crazier than his interlocutors, his muddy eyes glowing fanatically. "The two of you want to undergo this procedure? I'm telling you, my _friend, _Mr Morris, he didn't last for a day after it, they took him away this morning lying flat, if you get my meaning."

"It's a calculated risk," the fatter one of his interlocutors says in a friendly way.

"We understand what it's all about," says the younger man, "and the fact that you are here means that so do you."

"I am not insane!" yells the ugly man whom Michael finds familiar. "My dad was a bit crazy but that's another matter. I just want to go back to the place I was before as is my right under the law of this country."

"I'm afraid it doesn't work that way," the boy replies, "Ms Davis will determine what your condition requires. I have full trust in her abilities."

"Tell me, if you know," the ugly man retorts, trying to look calm, where he is not, Michael knows it, "who is the next one on the death row?"

"He is," the second interlocutor points at the lonely almost grey haired sturdy man, crouching in one corner of the garden. It's Roger, Michael's almost friend. He doesn't look happy about the procedure. Worse, he seems to be praying, eyes turned up, eager to find something in the sky that doesn't exist on the earth below. _Faith is in the heart_, Michaels knows it, but Roger's imploring position remains as real as the anger of the ugly man who is now studying him attentively.

"He doesn't seem to be thrilled about it or I am not called Theodore Bagwell," the southerner says in a tone of a preacher. The name echoes ominously in Michael's subconscious mind but he is unable to tell where he has heard it before. If he has heard it at all. His unease is such that he pushes his hat and the cover further down, wishing to melt in the wall he is leaning on, not to be noticed. _The southerner is trouble, _Michael believes, _he cannot be trusted._

The fat man who favors the procedure informs and infuriates Bagwell further: "It is natural to be upset. The odds of success are not very high, but Ian here and me, we think that the alternative is much worse. We are at peace."

"It's a death sentence!" Theodore screams. "They gave Mr Morris a nice meal and than they just _killed _him off. The state has no right to do this no matter what we have signed."

"The state can do whatever it wants to do. There's no way that an individual can stop it," Roger adds from the ground, philosophically. "I am trying to make my peace about it too, but it doesn't come easy."

"Mister," Ian tells Roger, disagreeing, "you should have thought of all that before you signed up. It is difficult either way, to live as we were living for the rest of our lives or to try for something better."

"How I wish I could go back," Roger says sincerely, "but it's too late for that. They have falsified my signature on the acceptance paper for this institution. My lawyer tried everything, but he could not do a thing about it. The court had the handwriting confirmed as mine."

Michael's heart goes out to Roger only at the moment of his professed innocence, strongly. He forgets why he has to be digging and for whom. A beast wakes up in his chest, and he thinks he cannot just leave by himself. Whatever this procedure is, that they want to do to Roger, the man didn't asked for it, he is forced to undergo it. And he might die as a result of it. Michael remembers the scream he had heard in the night and wonders if it was the unknown Mr Morris, passing. He doesn't know why his entire being rebels against leaving Roger to such destiny, but he cannot deny the rawness of the sensation. The facts are there, too, confirming that things are terribly wrong in St Agatha.

If he can go out, then there has to be a way to bring Roger too. He just has to think long and fast enough. The plan has to be sound.

"We have to break out," Theodore Bagwell says. The two men who are happy to be there just laugh and shake their heads.

Roger on the other hand says, confirming Michaels's findings under the ground: "It's impossible, son. St Agatha is better guarded than any military facility in this country. There is no way out."

_There is always a way out, _Michael thinks stubbornly, glad that he was left in the garden longer than usual. His vision narrows obsessively down to Roger, who is again praying in silence. He entirely misses the open window from where Kelly Davis is studying Michael, as keenly as her special patient had been observing the men talking among themselves.

When the attendants finally pick him up, Michael instinctively knows that he should only take Roger with him. Theodore Bagwell will stay exactly where he is. He can find his own way to freedom, but he'll never be part of the plan.

xxxxxxx

**Kelly's Private Office, later that evening**

"Nice performance," Kelly says to Ralph, reminding herself for the thousandth time to call him Roger, even in her dreams. "But you didn't think of one thing."

"And that is?" Roger asks, sprawled lazily on her happily red couch nursing the same glass of cognac that John T. Morris had tasted with T-Bag before the surgery.

"If Scofield fails to get you out soon enough, I will have to follow proper procedures. You will be placed in the secluded part within the restricted area, and if you are still not successful in leaving on time, I will have to operate on you. Meaning you would share the destiny of our friend Morris..."

Roger refutes her: "It has to be done that way to look credible. He still doesn't buy it fully in my opinion. He's on the way to where we want him to be but it has to get way more dramatic. We have to appeal to his base instincts he lived when his real brother was nearly put to death, to stimulate all his abilities of getting me out."

"And what if I have to..."

"If it goes that far, my dear," Roger says in a tone crying bloody murder, "I am sure that you will think of something to get indisposed and delay everything. You can shoot yourself in a leg or something... A hunting or a riding accident. Most sports can be so dangerous these days."

Kelly doesn't look forward to harming herself but she will do it if she has to. She has learned long ago that she is capable of doing anything if she has to. And she thinks that she may have just learned another precious, vital point, about Roger's end-game. The plans that Roger wants to trade to North Korea are hidden under her very nose, in St Agatha. She has no clue in which form, or format, but there can be no other reason why Roger wants to, no, needs to, be locked up in the secluded part before taking off. She knows that she will never find them on her own, even if she tears that part of the clinic down, stone by stone. Roger is not stupid and he would have hidden them well when he arrived to St Agatha. Too well. Her chances reside in observing him while he is there before he is able to retrieve them. If she is successful in that, than maybe, maybe, her final destiny will be better than the one she believes might await her. _Six feet under_, a bit sooner than she would have wanted. As if anyone ever truly wanted that. It was against human nature.

"Get back to your cell," she growls at him as she would at an old friend, and he smiles, buying her display of affection. Or so she hopes because you never know with Roger. At least she didn't mentally call him Ralph for full five minutes. "The cognac has clouded your mind, and in two minutes the cameras will override my input and start filming you again. The guard is waiting on the outside to take you there."

"I was just on my way, darling," he jokes.

Roger kisses her before he leaves, square on her mouth, in the last thirty seconds that are not filmed. His lips leave a trail of dirt and she frantically brushes teeth when she is gone. _Some things should be plainly forbidden in any line of work, _she thinks, feverishly pondering her next move.

xxxxx

**In the Wood near St Agatha**

Kelly finds that her day is far from over. When she finally drives away from the clinic, trying to forget the vegetative face of Mr John T. Morris after the surgery she performed, a car rides out from the forest and stops in the middle of the road, barring the way.

She doesn't need to look twice to know who that is.

_Paul._

When she steps out of the car, her gun is at ready, and his hands are up.

"Please don't," he says.

"I don't see why I wouldn't," she comments, emotionless, still feeling the awfulness of Ralph's tongue stuck somewhere in her gorge, tooth paste taste notwithstanding. "For an attempted assault, I would be in my right..."

"I didn't say you wouldn't," he says, dead serious and walks towards her. Walks towards her until she has to pull the trigger. Or not.

She doesn't fire the gun she's been holding, and the next taste in her mouth is so much better than anything she has felt in years. He will probably kill her with her own gun, but at least she won't go to her early grave tasting on Ralph.

They don't even reach the car.

There is soft grass on a meadow flanked by the tall trees on one side of the road. The day has been hot, and the sweet smell of plant life is more inebriating that the finest French cognac she didn't taste that night. She is entirely sober and there is no justification for what she is about to do. She doesn't know where her gun is and it doesn't really matter. It never mattered much with Paul.

"I should have done this immediately," he says, and sounds as if he means it. She doesn't reply but she agrees with his line of thinking, for a change, in its entirety. "Than maybe you would consider me as more than a piece of your expensive furniture."

She never thought of him as that, to tell the truth, but she likes the mental image he is projecting.

"Paul," she lets out when he is on top and sex comes so naturally to both of them that it frightens her.

Neither lasts very long even if she pretends to, keeping only the last inch of pride of not letting him _see _how good it was for her. They roll away from one another on the grass, each retiring to a space of his or her own.

And then, he ruins it.

"Please, Kelly," he says, "whatever you are up to, could you please just not hurt Sara. I will be your punch bag, even your shooting target if you wish, but she has had enough."

_This is about Sara, _she realizes and suddenly she agrees with Roger. She is even able to remember the correct name again. _Sara is expendable. _She hates herself for it and agrees with Roger anyway.

"A wrong thing to say, as usual" she mutters through her brushed teeth, standing up, running back to her own vehicle, picking up her clothes together with the shreds of her dignity as she finally walks away. "See you around, Paul," she says. "I hope you will enjoy the rest of your stay in Montana. You haven't been here for a while. Since Caroline Reynolds has had her way with you before she dumped you like a dirt bag that you are."

He is too stunned to follow, murky eyes puzzled by her reaction, even if it is impossible that he is so stupid not to understand. Men _can be _stupid, but not that much, not usually. _You_ don't have sex with a jealous cold blooded bitch like Kelly Davis and than plea in favor of another woman if you wish well to that person. Her car starts easily enough and despite the negativity of her thoughts, her body exhales a peaceful state of tiredness and fulfillment she only ever experienced with Paul the morning after. _The meadow after in this case_, she thinks, bitterly. She hits his car when passing it, on purpose, and it is more than satisfactory to cause the damage. Her top level all risk insurance will pay readily for her own. Those are the benefits that go hand in hand with being a CEO of a prestigious establishment such as St Agatha.

She smells the wood through the open window, wishing Paul was her furniture. Than things would be simple and she could use him and abuse him as she eats with knife and fork every day.

But he is not.

Paul will never be hers to keep.

So it's for the best to forget all about him and drive on.

XXXXXX

**A/N** Thank you to everyone who reviewed. They keep this story going and the author's uncertainties at bay.


	8. The Key

**Chapter 8 The Key**

**Garden, Michael's side, in front of the wall**

Sara was so distracted and... sad, unthinkably sad.

That seems to be the right word to describe how she ran from the building of the clinic past his small viewing point in the wall and far away, where he could no longer see her, at the end of what must be the end of her working hours. The time is all the same to him. Only the day and night passing make a small difference. She didn't stop and she didn't turn around. He cannot bear to see her that way. She should _smile, _and frequently, Michael believes.

_Is she in danger, too? _Michael thinks how he needs to go out sooner rather than later and suppresses the objection of his consciousness reminding him he should not do it until he finds a solution to take Roger with him as well. _But what if something happens to Sara by that time? _Kelly Davis doesn't look like a serial killer in a doctor's coat, but she has shown she is more than capable of murdering someone on purpose, on the surgery table. What else is she prepared to do? For the sake of some strange experiment going on, a sinister doing of some higher authority he doesn't care much to learn anything more about? He hates authority because it is always corrupt, or it had been, in his experience, every single time. _There is no honesty in any of them._ He is afraid of that conviction. Unable to pinpoint the origin of his negative experiences or what they all entailed in order to lead to such a strong and irrefutable belief on his part. _Or maybe I have killed more innocent people than Kelly did and they were right to treat me in any way they knew how, to stop me, _he considers the possibility.

_Why am I even alive then if Dr Davis is a monster? _he asks himself at the same time, and he cannot find a logical answer to that, yet. Because Kelly operated _on him_ as well, that's actually one of the few things he is sure about. Still, he was not taken out by faceless attendants to be buried like Mr Morris did.

The fact is, Michael is sorry for Roger, but now that he had seen Sara leaving in distress, he is selfish and he focuses only on what he needs to do. He only knows one way to break out of the clinic which is safe enough and almost fool proof, and it will only be enough for one person if he can switch off the security system under ground. He does not know when Roger is kept, and if he breaks the alarm system as he plans, he is almost certain the code will rearrange itself intelligently in a different pattern as soon as one single person has passed through it and beyond the area of its protection.

A particularly crazy thought comes to him then, and all of a sudden he knows what he has to do. But in order to do it he will need some help. He cannot do it alone. The best candidate for the first task is... well... the gardener who told him about the meaning of his name. It's not nice to _use _people like that but it has to be done.

"Hello!" he calls out to him at the end of the afternoon, shortly after Sara had left, wondering why he is _not _surprised that the gardener comes to him immediately. "I need you to do something for me," he whispers and the man he has only just met obeys as if they were best friends in another life, as if Michael is entitled to ask him for _anything_.

"Papi," he says, "what can I do for you? Just say it."

"You could start by telling my your name," Michael semi-consciously smiles his best smile, hoping it would work.

"Sucre," the man answers, almost _hurt_ by his question, eyes alight, "Fernando Sucre."

"Okay, Sucre," Michael continues very carefully, not willing to offend his new friend. Maybe his only friend within the walls of St Agatha. It is absurd, but it is no less true for it. "Invent a reason for Ms Davies to give you a ride back to civilization tonight, and pay attention to her selection of music. Tell me if there is a song that she listens to twice or one she hums along with, those kind of things. Let me know if you find out anything first thing tomorrow morning. _Anything. _But it has to be before lunch, do you understand?"

The gardener nods. He will try and that's enough for Michael. "Please" he asks him once again, underlying his plea. "I have to know that."

"What will you do with knowledge, celebrate the first day of summer with some singing?" Sucre jokes half-heartedly.

_That is tomorrow, _Michael remembers, letting the gardener see the shovel he had stolen from him, hidden in the ground under his feet. Sucre grins and seems to need no further answers.

He is Kelly's gardener yet he nods as if digging under walls to break out of the clinic is something perfectly normal, and more, as if he didn't expect anything less from Michael. "Very good," he says, "I'm in. My own car was about to break down anyway."

xxxxxxxx

Sara packs her suitcases that night, doing her best to ignore Paul sleeping on her couch. If she didn't try so hard not to see him, she wouldn't miss the black circles under his eyes and a completely ravaged look about him, which is so unlike Paul, measured, intelligent and as evil as necessary. When she came home, her uninvited guest murmured something about Lincoln leaving town with Mahone, on a _mission,_ but she hasn't paid him much attention either. She is back in jeans and the black dress lies wrinkled on the floor.

_I am leaving, _she thinks. _This has all been an illusion, a dangerous one._

The letter of her resignation stands written in front of the mirror in the bedroom. She makes so much noise opening the closet doors and the flimsy drawers that she is done packing faster than usual. But there is also a tiny body standing in her door, in a pyjama with a friendly dinosaur image on his chest.

"Mom," Mikey asks, "are we leaving?"

She nods in agreement and Mikey starts explaining, nervously, despite that it's past 11 pm and he should be sleeping. "Adelaide invited me to stay over at her place, tomorrow. Can I go, please? I will be good! And you sad yourself that her mother is nice and trustworthy!"

"Mikey," she starts but her son interrupts her again. "Please! We can leave the day after if we have to and than I can ask for her address and write to her when I learn how to write! I can almost do it, Mom!"

She sits on her bed and the boy runs into her lap, butting her stomach with his head, returning to the behaviour of a one year old, which he does only when something she did or is about to do really disturbs him. She cradles him to her chest and then he begs again: "One more day, Mom, what can happen in a day?"

_What can happen indeed? _Her irrational afternoon desire to leave starts seeming equally ridiculous as her morning wish to meet the unknown patient from St Agatha in person, hoping he of all people might be able to one day replace Michael Scofield in her life, if not in her heart. _I dressed up for him, as if I had a date with an opening in the wall... I refused to do that for Michael in a little time we had to share… And then I doll up for this stranger… _Sara is ashamed.

"Okay", she concedes to her son, "tomorrow evening I will drive you to your friend after work myself and when you return on the next day we will decide together what we should do. Is that all right?"

"That's just great, Mom!" Mikey exclaims and he means it, not a trace of sarcasm in his voice of a little boy, as there would always be with such simple phrases in his father's voice. It makes her want to cry. She doesn't cry because her son is there. He willingly lies in her bed, and in less than two minutes he is loudly snoring, sleeping on his back, both little arms raised high above his head. Sara is considering carrying him back to his bedroom but she would be visible to Paul if she did that. She would rather avoid any conversation if her uninvited guest wakes up to pay a nightly visit to her fridge. Milk is gone almost every morning, since Mikey and she are not alone, and so are the biscuits.

So she stretches next to her son, fully dressed. His small body presses into hers, like when he was less than a year old, protesting in his cot, until she would give in and take him to her bed where he would sleep more quietly than an angel. "My angel," she murmurs to a sleeping figure of the child before drifting off to sleep herself.

xxxxxxxxx

**Kelly's office, 20 June**

Kelly expects a forced social call from Michael any day now. She knows he has reached the limit of possible with his shovel, and he will have to provoke seeing her to try and obtain the key to the security system under the wall. She smiles evilly because the key is _not _what he thinks, and even if he would be on the right track, which is unlikely, there is a safety mechanism in place if a code is broken by accident or the unnatural smartness of a person suffering from low latent inhibition. Soon Michael will know there is no way out through the wall. He will have to think of something else, and bring Roger with him too. In two more days, Roger will be locked up in the separated wing for patients being prepared for surgery. _Nothing, nothing can go wrong this time,_ Kelly thinks, and her inside gets all feverish from only considering that something might not go as she planned.

She is surprised when the call doesn't come that day, and even more profoundly so when a special postal delivery brings in a grand bouquet of yellow roses (most people hate them, but they are her favourite) among which her gun is sent back to her, a yellow ribbon tied gingerly around the barrel. The bullets have been taken out. Kelly throws the flowers immediately away and tucks the gun in her purse, after refilling it with ammunition, to return it to her car where it belongs to later on. She is so flabbergasted by Paul's gesture, even if it is over, _they are over, _that she pays no attention to Sucre asking for a ride, nor to her morbid choice of music and singing along. She doesn't even check Sara's computer logs before leaving which she should do daily, to know for certain that the good doctor's knowledge has not overstepped from stumbling into secrets Kelly wants her to find out, into some real secrets of St Agatha which should be kept that way, hidden, for now.

She hums a classical piece of probably French music in Latin, from one of her personal collections, unaware of a former inmate scribbling the words she is mentioning on the palm of his hand. The mood of the tune she has chosen is strangely appropriate for her situation, especially if something in her perfect plan goes wrong and she is forced to harm herself. She wonders if Paul is between Sara's legs now and she fights the annoying mental image putting the music even louder.

**Kelly's office, 21 June**

Another bouquet of yellow roses is delivered on the next morning, with no weapons or ribbons to match. It almost ends in garbage like the previous one, but it is at that moment that Sara enters her office, way paler than usual. Kelly doesn't know to what she should attribute the change, and it doesn't look like a consequence of a good sex, which in itself is reassuring and flattering Kelly's shaken ego.

"Are you okay?" she asks with false worry, leaving the roses on the table for the time being.

"And if I wasn't?" Sara answers recklessly, black T-shirt, blue jeans, dressed as if she was going on vacation. As if she was _leaving. _"Would you try to drown me in the sink?"

So Paul has told her. It was to be expected.

"I don't know what he has told you when he was between your legs," Kelly comments rudely, ignoring the slap which lands sharply on her left cheek. It will bruise but she doesn't care. "It's not my fault that what we had did not work. Maybe it'll go better for the two of you."

"The only thing I wish," Sara says, sincerely, "is to get Paul off my couch. I rented a house, not a charity for stray animals."

Kelly chuckles as the words of her employee, pouring cold water over the waves of jealousy she still feels. At least now she can look at Sara again without wishing her to die on the spot or desiring to spill her brains open with one of her surgical knives. She reminds herself that the other women are not at fault when a man walks away, men are at fault too. It is a rationalisation, and it is true, yet it doesn't help as much as it should. Because it's so much easier to turn against the other woman than against the source of her problems. With the last name of Kellerman, and apparently polluting Sara's couch.

"I could help with that," Kelly suggests imagining Paul's face if she would walk into Sara's living, "but than you should invite me to your home."

"I will skip that if you don't mind." Sara says. "There is a simpler way. Montana isn't what I expected. Today I will gather my belongings and tomorrow I'll leave."

Kelly Davis gulps and tries hard to hide the shock at her worst assumptions being so bluntly confirmed. Sara leaving is not part of the plan at all and it should _not_ happen. If she leaves, Michael might lose his true even if subconscious source of motivation to break out. And, in passing, he could forget everything about Roger too. Michael's wife stares at her and Kelly knows she failed miserably to mask her surprise. "Hell," she curses, "I don't know what Paul Kellerman has told you about my profession, but I abandoned the military 10 years ago."

"The military?" Sara asks and Kelly realizes she had made a mistake, revealing a detail Sara was _not _told.

There is no other way but to clear Sara's doubt but to offer a different version of the truth. Kelly is glad that so many varieties of the truth can peacefully coexist at most times.

"Both Paul and me had military training in our youth. My talents were elsewhere so through the military I could arrange a scholarship for the medical school, and Paul turned into agent business with Caroline Reynolds," she explains."My latest scientific project is performing experimental surgeries for terminal brain cancer patients."

"My patients know beforehand what are the odds," she continues. "Some live, and some don't. You are a doctor as well, you should be able to understand that much. I will let you see my research and the necessary permits of the federal authorities and the state of Montana. Paul and his friend, agent Mahone, have already had a good look. I'm sure that they omitted to inform you about that. I only advertise my side activity among other medical professionals treating patients with such diagnosis, not in newspapers. That way they can advise their patients on whether to contact me or not. I think it is only a fair thing to do."

It is not by half all the truth, not even close to it, but Kelly finally sees shadows of doubt overtaking the righteous fury in Sara's hazel eyes, and what she said should better work.

"Brain cancer?" is the only thing Sara is able to whisper. Her voice is cracking with emotion, barely audible. Kelly gets terribly afraid that she has just made another huge mistake, and that Sara will understand everything Kelly has done to Michael, by some supernatural telepathy among lovers who truly cared for each other, unlike Kelly and Paul.

"I'd like to see your research," Sara finishes lamely, her resistance broken, and Kelly Davis, a secret agent turned murderous and on the loose ten years ago, barely finds a strength to nod. She feels as if she has just crossed an abyss walking on the thin rope. She has to be _much _more careful in the future. She should also check Sara's logs instead of getting busy with throwing flowers or sentimental about former lovers. Sara's leaving has nothing to do with what Paul said because it is obvious she didn't believe him at first. It has everything to do with the reported death of Mr Morris that could have been seen and double-checked in St Agatha's computing terminals the day before, if Sara looked for it on purpose.

Another bouquet of yellow roses is delivered precisely at that moment. Kelly leaves it on the table, touching it only briefly, as if it was a nest of snake and not a harmless gift. Then she looks up one of CDs with the summary of her legitimate medical research and hands it over to Sara.

"I didn't think Paul was the type to give flowers," Sara has the cheek to comment.

"Flowers won't get him anywhere," Kelly retorts dryly reliving the images of Paul on top of Michael's wife, which perhaps exist only in her mind. The temptation to kill Sara is replaced by an equally dangerous one of telling Michael who Sara is or simply leave him in her office long enough that he can escape with her. But that would ruin her life's work, and she will not allow it. "It's a little bit too late to woo me with plant life."

Sara relaxes a tiny bit and says, genuinely, "I think I know exactly what you mean."

Kelly thinks how Sara and her could be friends in another place, and in another time. They could go to toilet together if they went to the same high school and chat about good looking boys. It is not to be. They are on the opposing sides, and she can only hope she has done enough so that Sara will not run away from Montana just yet, as she has been running from everything since Michael was gone. She has to stay until Kelly's personal mission in St Agatha is over. By any means necessary.

xxxxxxx

**Michael's room, 21 June**

"Papi," the gardener comes under his window way before breakfast. "It was not easy. I don't know if I got it right."

"Yes?" Michael asks peering down. His room is many floors up from the ground level. The view is great but it is almost impossible to maintain a sensible conversation.

"It's a song for the dead, she told me," Sucre mutters nervously from below as if he was talking to himself, afraid of attendants who may start coming and going any minute when St Agatha wakes up again. He hits the ground with a shovel to pretend he is doing something even if no single plant grows on the concrete under Michael's window. "It sounds very powerful, many people were singing. It's old music, from Europe, I think. Very serious. From somebody called Foré, she said. I asked for the name but she replied so fast, and I couldn't ask again. The part she sang as well was about liberty, I think."

"Thanks, Sucre!" Michael howls down and retires from the window just on time because his breakfast is being brought in, not a second later than can be expected in an establishment functioning to a perfection like St Agatha. He gets tremendously impatient and anxious waiting for lunch time, which comes only several hours later. Then he should have enough time for the next step he has in mind. He has to fight the smells, the colours, the textures, every little detail of his already consumed breakfast and his too familiar room invading him all over again.

A minute after lunch is delivered and the attendant is out, his spoon is under the door and his body out of the view of the cameras watching him, if only partially. They can see a piece of him, but not exactly what he is doing. In another two minutes he is back in the watching room where only one woman is seated at the computer, the others gone for lunch break as he hoped.

"Hello," he says and the woman startles. He smiles at her, and she eases a bit. He must have a really nice smile to go with his eyes, because it is already the second time that the same trick works.

"How did you get out?" she asks, visibly altered by his presence.

_Who am I, and what is it that can I do, that people are so afraid of me? _he thinks, bitter. There is no answer. Or there is no easy answer at any rate.

"Was it locked?" he plays surprised. "I just opened the door. I wanted to get some air."

"Wait here," she tells him, predictably, walking two steps away from him, to the outer door of the watching room. He steps forward, playing innocent, but the advances of his not so tall but rather sturdy body and shoulders are decisive, and purposefully performed to look menacing. His smile has cooled down to a grimace.

As soon as the woman is out and he hears her passing her personal card on the outside, enclosing him safely in the watching room, Michael searches online for the most famous requiems that there are. He spots almost instantly the one written by someone called G. Fauré where the most popular part comes towards the end. It's something beginning with "Libera me". _That_ is excellent because it also corresponds to what Sucre thinks he heard with his Spanish mother tongue. Michael doesn't have time to dwell on the notion how he knows at all what Sucre's second mother tongue is, or that his conviction is of a decidedly personal nature, surpassing nationality stereotypes of all kinds about the gardener he barely knows. He is able to listen in relative peace to the over four minute long sequence of classical music he is interested in. The only other sound in the room being the too fast beating of his curious heart.

He commits it partially to memory and he is still able to delete the results of his browsing before the woman is back with the man who brought him lunch, strong steps pounding in the corridor. _The cavalry has come_, he thinks, and laughs at the stupid metaphor. He follows his gaolers back to his room without discussion. They don't ask for an explanation and he is not offering them any. A bulge is prominent on one the right side of the man's white jacket. _A weapon, _it has to be. Michael is very lucky, though. He had heard that particular piece of music Kelly likes in a life he doesn't remember, and he believes he was made to study the language it is sung in, _somewhat_, at least, _at the university_, maybe. He needs some time to think about it now and by the fall of the evening he should be ready.

He should.

When the time comes for his stroll in the garden, he pays attention to the door they are taking him through, for the first time. The spoon he stole after lunch, using the commotion of the people guarding him, will do for those too, if his luck holds.

If it holds.

It has to.

When he tries to go out, it has to be completely dark, and he has no idea what he will find on the outside. He has no idea what will happen to Roger if he breaks out and it pains him to leave him there, more than it should, for he doesn't know the man after all. They only share a common misery of being the guinea pigs in somebody else's hospital.

But Sara was sad and it is the first day of summer. He remembered that briefly during his frantic computer search, as he notices the weather, as he notices everything.

He needs to go to her.

He has to try.

**A/N** Thank you to everyone who reviewed! Without you, this story would not continue.


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